The Shops at Willow Bend shopping centre pair Texas ambience with contemporary convenience. Anchored by Dillard’s, Macy’s and Neiman Marcus, the mall hosts a wide variety of stores, including a focus on home décor. Sitting in a sweet spot along the Dallas Parkway, the North Dallas-area mall continues to grow, with new spaces still in development.
‘My partner designed the original system there 15 years ago, and we’ve overseen and maintained it ever since, replacing and fixing the amps and so on,’ recalls Senior Systems Engineer Patrick Burke of Dallas systems integrator BBD Technology Group.
Recently, the system needed ‘a lot of updating’. ‘They had an outdated old DSP and a computer that was still running Windows 98,’ Burke continues. ‘We’ve been after them for years to replace that old DSP, and recently they agreed to our proposal to install a Symetrix Prism 16x16 with an xIO 4x4 Dante-enabled analogue I/O expander. The Prism and Dante let us improve and expand their system in ways we couldn’t have done before.’
Aslo part of the update programme was the installation of Powersoft Ottocanali, Quattrocanali and Duecanali amplifiers, providing 22 channels and 8kW for the mall’s 16 zones and more than 500 loudspeakers.
A 45-year industry veteran, Burke was a early adopter of DSP systems: ‘Symetrix has always been a brand I like,’ he states. ‘Sound quality is excellent, the DSPs are reliable, and they’re easy for me to work with. Of course, a true understanding of analogue electronics is required to program any DSP. Gain structure is a crucial issue. But assuming you know what you’re doing, Symetrix Composer software makes the job a lot easier. For The Shops at Willow Bend, we built a GUI using Symetrix software, which we haven’t done before. It’s working very well.’
The Shops at Willow Bend uses five audio zones, with a further eight zones in the parking garages. ‘We’ve got messages that play in the parking garages, music that plays in the main mall, emergency messages that play in the main mall and the garages, and paging that plays everywhere,’ Burke says. ‘We are going to install another Symetrix xIO 4x4 expander to serve a new area outside some restaurants by the Dillard’s store, and we’ll pass signal back and forth to the main unit and create another DSP string for sound going to the outside area.’
BBD replaced an old Windows 98 PC with a new HP computer running Windows 10, including a touchscreen to run the new custom GUI. ‘Right now, we’re trying to get it on their network so their operations guy can pull up the GUI on his machine and control volumes and such,’ Burke expounds. ‘Security does it right now, and they have to go back into the rack room. I’ve got them providing me a fibre link between the two racks, with a copper transceiver, so we can do Dante between the main machine and the other rack. I really like Dante, and with the Symetrix Prism, we now have a system that can handle all that.’
As the mall’s loudspeakers are old but serviceable, Burke was not inclined to replace them, but has renewed the amplification with Powersoft. ‘We had continuously been repairing these older amplifiers,’ he explains. ‘These were mostly class-A/B amps with power supplies that were starting to fail, fans that didn’t work and limited access to back panels – we had to remove the amps from the racks just to access them.’
After a meeting with Kurt Metzler of Powersoft at InfoComm, Burke took a close look at the Ottocanali, Quattrocanali and Duecanali platforms: ‘I was enthused by the quality of the products and the fact that they are made in Italy is something that I respect,’ he says. ‘I was originally considering using a different major amplifier brand, and in fact already put an advance down. But when I saw these amplifiers I changed my mind.’
Burke and two of his associates performed the installation over the course of two evenings. Situated in an equipment closet of the security office, the old amplifiers – which consumed a total of three 72-inch racks and weighed about 50lb each – the old amps were replaced with a new Powersoft system that consumed just five rack spaces. Burke says that the new amplifiers are not only throwing off much less heat, but also consume power much more efficiently: ‘Due to the way these amplifiers work, we are probably using about 30 per cent of the AC wattage that we used to use in the past. Plus I am running all of this off a single 120V circuit.’
Since the Powersoft system has been in place, it has been performed flawlessly, he says. And while he chose not to swap out the old speakers, by all accounts the system sounds remarkably better: ‘Even though the old speakers have been in the mall for 17 years, everyone I talk to says it sounds better than it ever has, and I didn’t even mess with the EQ or anything else in the system. There were even areas we couldn’t hear before at all, but once we put the new Powersoft amps in, all of a sudden they were working again.’
Although the upgraded system is up and running, the BBD team is by no means finished at The Shops at Willow Bend. ‘This mall is one of the few brick-and-mortar places that’s still surviving and growing,’ he says. ‘The client is happy with the improvements, and they continue to invest in the upgrade, so this project is expanding, and I see more work coming. Symetrix Prism DSPs with Dante enable us to build out the system as needed to accommodate their growth. It’s a very interesting project, and I’m enjoying it.
‘I have to be honest with you – I have never been so proud of any of my designs as I am of this one.’
