The Brook in New Hampshire, America’s largest charity casino that’s located in Seabrook and offers more than 500 gaming machines, a sports book, a poker room, and an array of table games joined by an outdoor deck, showroom, banquet space, and restaurant, recently underwent an audio upgrade in an project centered on an Allen & Heath AHM-64 matrix processor.
The Brook has 16 separate audio zones (with several more being added in the near future), each being fed with different blends of three microphones, six cable TV receivers, two music players, and four computers. Because of the variety of events and styles of entertainment across the location, the casino needed the option to have certain inputs push out across all zones, while also allowing each zone to operate completely independently on source and level.
With the AHM-64, The Brook has plenty of room for current growth projections and any plans they may develop in the future. An AR2412 networked stagebox provides an expandable 24 mic/line inputs and 12 outputs for the system, in addition to the 12 local inputs and 12 outputs on the AHM itself. A Dante module was also added to the system for future-proofing and further expansion.
Five Allen & Heath IP-1 wall-plate controllers are sprinkled throughout the venue, giving one-knob control to management and staff for source selection, levels, and more. The facility’s management team plans on adding additional Allen & Heath IP controllers in the future to give the staff even more control over the distributed audio.
“The AHM system was recommended to me by our A/V integrator,” says the director of engineering for The Brook. “When I did my own independent research, I was extremely impressed. AHM also had a lot of fantastic reviews online. We needed a rock-solid audio distribution platform with a ton of flexibility, and AHM fit that bill in every way.”
Due to AHM’s playback feature, The Brook also now runs audio ads throughout the day. “The system lets us load in an audio file that will describe to our guests our upcoming promotions, concerts, and events,” explains an employee. “It triggers throughout the day every 90 minutes. The system is so configurable that it lets us select which zones the ads run in, have a different volume per zone based on that zones acoustic environment, trigger them at the set times, and then go right back to our normal programming. It is absolutely incredible what we can do with the AHM.”
