InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) recently converted their downtown Dallas, Texas Holiday Inn to a Crowne Plaza.
With the shift in brands came a dramatic increase in required meeting/celebration space.
IHG undertook a large-scale renovation of the 23-story building and hired Rutherford Design of Northridge, California to design a sound system for the new lobby, plaza, mezzanine, and restaurant/bar.
Company owner Richard Rutherford relied on a combination of Symetrix and SymNet processors to deliver all of the complex functionality required of the system.
He utilized programmable SymNet ARC wall panels to present that complex system to the hotel’s staff in an intuitive interface.
Because the system was far from plug-and-play, Rutherford hired a Symetrix technician in the final stages of the installation who completed Rutherford’s work far ahead of schedule.
Of the four interconnected systems, the lobby is the least complex. It takes four music sources, two from Muzak and two local, for distribution throughout the main entrance and nearby walkways.
A SymNet 8×8 DSP provides input signal conditioning and output conditioning for Tannoy CMS-801 recessed ceiling speakers powered by a pair of QSC ISA 800T amps.
A Symetrix ARC-SWK wall panel provides input selection and volume control for both the lobby and the plaza/mezzanine, which both take feeds from the lobby’s SymNet 8×8 DSP for background music.
The plaza and the mezzanine both have three grand ballrooms. Six meeting rooms at the plaza level and a pre-function room on the mezzanine level add to the complexity of these. Each room provides varying numbers of connections for microphones, line-level signals, and computer audio outputs.
Two SymNet 8×8 DSPs in the plaza rack and a third in the mezzanine rack are supplemented by as many SymNet BreakIn12s for a grand total of sixty inputs.
Seven each of Symetrix ARC-SWK and ARC-SW4 wall panels present user control of what, at first glance, might appear to be a dizzying array of room combinations, input selections, and volume controls. Six QSC ISA 300T and two QSC ISA 500T amps drive TANNOY CMS 801 ceiling speakers.
“The Dallas Crowne Plaza was a very complex project,” remarked Rutherford. “The SymNet technology is tremendously flexible. I can make things as simple or as involved as I need to in order to achieve a particular result.”
“In addition, the GUI is massively intuitive and, frankly, good looking! As an integrator, I’m often forced to work with gear that gives me a headache. SymNet is a welcome break from that – in fact, I’d say it’s actually fun to work with!”
“We weren’t completely pressed for time on this job,” he continued, “but I was still concerned that we might blink and miss something in the programming process. To make sure everything performed as promised when we commissioned the system, we hired a Symetrix technician for two days.”
“It was brilliant. He was an absolute expert. Not only did he work out any bugs in far less time than I thought it would take me and my staff, he trained us as he went. We learned a lot and saved a ton of time.”