Located in the San Fernando Valley, the Warner Center Marriott has been catering a wide range of events – including corporate meetings, Hollywood parties, large galas, sweet sixteens and weddings – in its 11,000 square-foot, 1,500-seat ballroom for quite some time.
The space is extremely flexible and, with the capacity to subdivide into ten smaller meeting rooms, can be configured up to twenty different ways to meet the needs of any particular event.
But for over a decade, the hotel had suffered with a ballroom sound system that was not nearly as flexible and which offten suffered from embarrassing technical issues not appropriate for such a unbecoming of so posh a setting.
Fed up, the Warner Center Marriott cut its losses and replaced the uncooperative system with a system based upon on Symetrix’ SymNet DSP and Symetrix wall panels.
Marriott contracted KVL Audio Visual Services to design and install the replacement system.
KVL design engineer, Virgil Reyes, oversaw the project, taking care to understand the frustrations of the hotel management and staff with the old system and their hopes for the new system.
Those aspirations boiled down to a simple need of a system that works reliably and intuitively: easy to imagine for the user, but potentially challenging for the designer.
The global inputs to the system didn’t change much: a CD player, an MP3 player, and a decoder unit for the hotel’s subscription background music service reside in a head-end rack.
However, now each of the ten potential meeting rooms contains multiple microphone- and line-level inputs for voice reinforcement and device amplification. Two SymNet 8×8 DSP units supplemented by four SymNet BreakIn12 units provide a total of 64 inputs and ample DSP horsepower to provide input conditioning, routing logic, and output conditioning.
“We had a total of twenty different room configurations, and each of them needed different equalization and dynamics settings,” said Reyes.
“The capacity to do that comfortably and at a reasonable price were important considerations in selecting SymNet.”
Users select room combinations, input sources, and output volume using each of ten SymNet ARC-2 wall panels located at each of the ten potential meeting rooms and amplification is provided by two QSC CX204V four-channel amps and one QSC CX304V two-channel amp.
Sixty-six Atlas Sound FAP62T ceiling-mounted coaxial speakers reproduce the processed inputs with convincing transparency.
“SymNet allows us to recall presets that we built for previous projects, making settings such as equalization, input counts, etc. instantly up and active,” recalled Reyes.
“In the end SymNet easily gave us the processing power and flexibility to make the audio system as versatile as the meeting space itself.”