Having struggled with the daily management of the previous system, London’s Excel Exhibition Centre called on installation specialists Paul Todd and Eddie Thomas of SSE Audio to provide a scalable QSC Q-Sys digital audio network. Based around a Core 1100 processor, the QSC system replaces Excel’s ageing background music system, and is used in conjunction with an existing Ateis Voice Alarm. All of the QSC equipment was provided by Shure Distribution UK.
Excel’s brief was to create a fully redundant network with a user-friendly graphical user interface. As one of London’s largest Exhibition Centres, offering a total of 100,000-sq-m of usable space across 50 separate areas, Excel can now use Q-Sys to control up to 20 simultaneous events from two touchscreens in the operations room. In addition to its capacity to play background music, Q-Sys allows the organisers to make announcements to any of the halls. The highly adaptable system is complemented by flexible routing and, despite its complexity, remains simple to configure and easy to operate by the staff.
Q-Sys has been integrated into Excel’s existing fibre network ring, and now distributes up to 256 x 256 digital audio channels from 18 racks, each with fibre network connectivity and full redundancy. Thanks to Q-Sys’s remote reporting options – which, at Excel, send alerts directly to the installers – SSE engineers are constantly kept abreast of how the system is operating.
‘We usually know about any faults before the staff at the venue,’ Paul Todd explains. ‘It also lets us know if any replacement equipment is needed before we visit the site, which eliminates multiple trips and shortens system downtime for Excel.’
Shure UK and SSE have had a long and strong relationship, and Shure Distribution UK’s Systems Group was involved in the project from the early planning stages. Project Consultant Pat Bradley and members of the Excel team were invited to Shure’s UK demo facilities to explain the features and benefits Q-Sys could offer the venue.
‘Paul and Eddie are Q-Sys super-users who share an enormous amount of experience creating bespoke audio networks,’ says Shure Applications Support Engineer Tom Colman. ‘Their work makes you realise just how powerful a well-designed Q-Sys network can be.’
According to Todd, the upgrades at Excel have future-proofed the venue, but he notes that the most significant outcome of the project is the high level of customer satisfaction: ‘I estimate that Excel will not have to upgrade the Q-Sys network for ten years, at least. The client is extremely happy with the results; they actually described the new system as life changing.’
