Located in the Atlantic Coast resort town of Myrtle Beach, this $400 million music fan's dream boasts themed rock 'n' rollercoasters like Led Zeppelin: The Ride and Eagles: Life in the Fast Lane among its 50 rides and attractions, and dedicates entire sections of the park to pop-music movements such as the British Invasion, '70s era rock and even country music.
Peavey worked closely with Hard Rock Park and systems integrator Electrosonic to create an unparalleled music experience. As the first new major attraction built in the US in nearly a decade, Hard Rock Park benefits from the evolution of technology manifested in the Peavey MediaMatrix NION audio distribution system, the ribbon-loaded Peavey Versarray line array and the Crest Audio Pro 200 Series power amplifiers.
The largest segment of the Hard Rock Park project is the background music and paging system, which consists of a cadre of nine MediaMatrix NION n3 processors that configure and control more than 130 zones of audio covering the entire 55-acre park. MediaMatrix CAB 4n CobraNet break-out boxes convert the uncompressed digital CobraNet audio to analogue audio and distribute it to nearly 1,000 Peavey PR Series and Impulse Series loudspeakers that are mounted on poles throughout the resort and weatherized for permanent outdoor installation in South Carolina's humid climate.
"There are a dozen stage areas throughout the park where a band can set up and plug a mixing console into the MediaMatrix system," said Tim Smith, project engineer at Electrosonic. "Because there are no more than six speakers to each zone, we have the flexibility to narrow the system for live shows. The speakers in that particular zone will then switch over to the live show instead of the BGM. That flexibility is all enabled by the MediaMatrix NION."
Three on-site live-show venues - Hard Rock Live as the premier performance site, plus the Roadie Stunt Show, and Malibu Beach Party attractions are controlled via individual NION n6 processing nodes that talk to the main system via fibre and transfer CobraNet audio and control information in both directions.
(Jim Evans)
