Over the past few years its project technical team, including IT director Iype Abraham and technical services manager, Scott Bradley, have been working with integrators, Visual Systems Sales Ltd (part of Myriad Audio Visual Group), to evolve the concept for their principle theatres, and this includes a pristine audio signal path, delivered by the BSS Soundweb London digital processing.
As a result, the master scheme created for the five-star May Fair Hotel, is now being rolled out, and this month Visual Systems project consultant Ray Sappal was able to commission the technical refit of the reconfigurable Folio Suite and six private rooms a few miles across London at the Bloomsbury Street Hotel.
To meet a large percentage of its audio requirements Visual Systems Sales has turned to Harman Pro distributors, Sound Technology, to ensure that the soundtrack, streamed from eight-track Music Solutions servers, is optimally processed in the BSS Soundweb London environment.
At The May Fair Hotel, five Soundweb London BLU-16's process the feeds, which are output to a pair of Crown eigbht-channel CTs 8200 eight-channel amplifiers and other third party devices before being played out through a total of some 164 JBL Control 26C in-ceiling speakers.
All the Soundwebs are identically-configured to feed 11 Private Suites, as well as larger meeting rooms, the Crystal banqueting room (which has its own dedicated BLU-16) and the Mez Bar. In total, 22 zones are fed by the Soundwebs, each zone with its own local rotary pot volume control. The Crystal Room also has a wired microphone point connected to the BLU-16, with local gain control.
Said Ray Sappal, "We have been using Soundweb for six years and we love its reliability, its five year warranty and the fact you can alter the programmes easily via the network or remotely. Once programmed they are very robust and will run 24/7. We programmed the Soundweb gain structure with preset levels to ensure the dynamics are optimised."
Soundweb is also used to switch the Control 26C speakers in combination - feeding some with the site-wide piped music and others with the local sound.
The technical architecture at the nearby Bloomsbury Street Hotel follows a similar model to The May Fair with certain advantages. As a result of a £25m overhaul, Bloomsbury Street boasts HD and Blu-ray facilities throughout all its conference spaces, while the main Folio Suite can be reconfigured as a single 300-capacity room or as three separate spaces, using room dividers.
All the audio dynamics are programmed into a pair of Soundweb London BLU-16s which can switch the JBL Control 26C room speakers between the piped system and the local sound source. Once again, a microphone point is connected to the BLU-16 in the Folio Suite with local gain control.
(Jim Evans)
