An upgrade of its audio systems gave Melbourne’s Crown Spas complex a pleasant surprise recently, when local A/V integrator Digital Living brought the project in an estimated 15 to 20 per cent under budget. Key to this saving was the use of a QSC Q-Sys Core 500i processor at the heart of the system. The venue’s upgrade also calls on 22 QSC TSC-3 touchscreens and 15 QSC CX254 four-channel amplifiers.
The Crown complex, located on the south bank of the Yarra river, is renowned as housing one of the largest casinos in the world, as well as three hotels, luxury shopping facilities, several nightclubs, a cinema, various restaurants and two spas, including the five-star Crown Spas. The brief for its new audio system required the routing of four in-house audio streams from the Crown Casino’s main A/V control centre to more than 40 zones in the Crown Spas, via a second switch in the luxury Crown Towers hotel. The system also had to integrate the Crown complex’s fire/evacuation Emergency Warning & Intercommunication System (EWIS). In addition, it needed to be bi-directional, allowing managers the option of connecting iPods to provide custom soundtracks in the gym and spa rooms. Audio from inputs in the spas and gym areas had to be routable back to the proposed audio management platform for the complex, and accessible from the main control centre if required.
Due to the size of the complex, the audio network extends over considerable distances. From the audio inputs in the main control centre to the hotel is more than 500m, and from the main control centre to the various spa and gym rooms is a further 100m. When Digital Living first quoted for the refurbishment, the labour costs to lay the proposed network cabling alone were considerable. Much of the existing Crown complex A/V infrastructure is connected by fibre-optic cabling, and to similarly specify the new systems was going to be expensive.
‘Giles Brading at TAG, the Australian QSC distributor, suggested we try looking at the numbers again with a Q-Sys system,’ explains Digital Living Director, Matt Price. ‘When we did, we found we could make massive savings.’
Because Q-Sys networks can use ‘off-the-shelf’ Ethernet wiring and switches, much of the cost associated with traditional audio cabling and the labour required to install it could be struck from the original quote – and because of the distances involved, this amounted to a large saving. In the completed Q-Sys network, audio is still routed to and from the Core 500i processor in the main A/V control centre to the Crown Towers hotel via fibre-optic cable, but existing fibre connections were used for this leg. From the hotel data racks onwards, all audio is routed on Cat6 networking cable laid by Digital Living, which connects the Q-Sys I/O Frames, TSC-3 touchscreens and CX254 amps in the spa and gym areas.
‘We have used QSC amps and speakers on a lot of projects in recent years, but tended to use other products for the audio management layer,’ says Price. ‘We had looked at using Q-Sys on smaller projects, but we hadn’t proposed it for an installation on this scale before. This project made us look into it in more detail, and made us into total converts. The amount of bi-directional traffic that’s passing through those Ethernet connections at the Spa and across the Crown complex is pretty impressive.
‘The individual components, such as the Core 500i processor, were a little more expensive than other equipment we have used in the past, but the investment in it was well worth it. Because of the complexity of the wiring and infrastructure required to run this network over this large area, when you looked at the costs of the system as a whole, there was a significant saving with Q-Sys. Given this outcome and the features and versatility of Q-Sys, it’s now developed into our primary audio networking product.’
More: www.digitalliving.com.au
More: http://qsc.com
