The newly completed Marina Bay Sands Resort in Singapore is monumental in size and scope – it is the world’s most expensive standalone casino property.
It includes a 2,561-room hotel, a convention and exhibition center, a museum, shops, restaurants and a casino with 500 tables and 1,600 slot machines.
Marina Bay Sands’ distributed-audio background music system is equally impressive, with more than 6,000 JBL Control Contractor Series loudspeakers installed throughout the resort, along with more than 100 Crown amplifiers, 75 BSS Audio processors and hundreds of miles of cable.
The audio system uses a variety of JBL Control Series loudspeakers including the Control 47C/T and 47LP medium-format ceiling speakers, 26CT small-format ceiling speakers and 328C large-format ceiling speakers, 126WT in-wall speakers, 28T and 25AV indoor/outdoor speakers, CRV wall-mount speakers and JBL CBT 50LA column speakers.
The speakers were installed using custom mounting hardware and custom grilles that were painted in a wide variety of colors, to match the décor of a particular location and ensure that the speakers blended invisibly with their environment.
“One of the biggest selling points of the JBL loudspeakers for Marina Bay Sands was the wider dispersion and smoother off-axis roll-off,” said Rodney Houston, Regional Sales Director, Asia, Harman Professional. “This actually enabled the Sands to use less ceiling speakers in the system, thereby reducing the overall cost without compromising the sound.”
The various JBL Control Series models were chosen for their suitability to a particular installation application.
The Control 47C/T 6.5-inch in-ceiling speaker provides extended bass, along with a wide 120-degree coverage area that allows fewer speakers to cover a larger space, with an even tonal balance on- and off-axis. Because of their shallower depth, the Control 26CT and Control 47LP 6.5-inch in-ceiling models were used in areas with less available mounting depth.
A number of JBL Control CBT 50LA column speakers were used in the hotel atrium. The CBT 50LA’s sleek, slim-profile design enables it to blend in with its surroundings, while its Constant Beamwidth Technology overcomes the limitations of traditional column design (narrower coverage at higher frequencies) by maintaining a specific coverage over a very wide bandwidth, with consistent frequency response at every distance as well as on- and off-axis.
