High stakes
Published: MEA
The expanded Boardwalk Casino in Port Elizabeth is home to a new networked audio backbone combining BGM and voice evacuation. James Ling goes behind the scenes
As Sun International had its license for the Boardwalk Casino in Port Elizabeth renewed, it promised to invest one billion Rand (US$100 million) into the site and local economy. The new five-star hotel and spa, conference centre and expanded casino have gone a long way towards doing this, as well as giving the venue the opportunity to upgrade its audio system with a new networked solution.
Boardwalk’s original audio solution had served it well for a decade. However, the analogue technology was becoming increasingly difficult for staff to manage and any changes became costly as contractors had to be brought in to manage the system.
The new license provided a fresh opportunity for Boardwalk’s management to address this issue. It decided to invest in a digital system that could network the existing site with the extra facilities that were planned. Added to this, it wanted to combine the BGM with the voice evacuation in a standards-compliant single system that could also provide pro audio quality background music.
To achieve this, working with audio consultant Mark Ransom, local systems integrator Avitech Systems has combined Biamp’s AudiaFlex and Vocia to provide one system for the BGM and evacuation. ‘We convinced them we could do this with one system, still giving high-quality background music but at the same time still providing the standard requirements of a voice evacuation system to EN-54,’ smiles Lawrence Bricknell, manager of Avitech Systems.
‘We did that using Vocia as the evacuation component,’ he explains. ‘Vocia is a good paging system, but it’s not really designed to do room combining and all the nice things we can do in AudiaFlex. So we put AudiaFlex as a front end to it, we created all our zones in AudiaFlex and then fed them as a composite zone signal into the Vocia system as a BGM source.’ This means the Vocia only ever plays out one BGM source. This source is controlled by the AudiaFlex units.
‘On the security side, at the staff entrance and at the security control room, they have the Vocia paging microphones so if they need to do an announcement for an evacuation, they can do it from there,’ explains Mr Bricknell. ‘Whatever else happens, it overrides the BGM.’
The new system has given the casino a much greater control over the audio within the venue. ‘We put AudiaFlex in and they were blown away that they could all of a sudden sit in an office on the computer with DaVinci and adjust the audio rather than having to bring a contractor in. They were taken by this,’ recalls Mr Bricknell.
While being used to provide the BGM source for the new smoking casino as well as the various zones of the enlarged original casino, AudiaFlex has really come into its own at the new hotel and convention centre site. ‘The hotel is also multi-zone and next to the hotel is the conference centre,’ says Mr Bricknell. ‘That’s also a multi-zone 2,500 sq-m venue sub-divided into four rooms and breakaway rooms. So we have room dividing and there’s probably 30 different audio zones. We used AudiaFlex in there as well for the background music.
‘It’s mind blowing that you can have three 34U racks full of gear and reduce that into one 2U AudiaFlex,’ he continues. ‘We’ve got two racks in the hotel, one for the hotel and the other for the conference system. In the conferencing side we are using an AudiaFusion cabinet. The product is a pleasure to work with and Biamp’s technical support is out of this world. They really support their product well.’
The other end of the signal chain has seen the installation of Bose speakers to allow playout for both the BGM and the evacuation systems. ‘We used Bose DS-16s in the smaller areas and DS-40s in the larger areas. That is in the casino as well as the conference centre and the hotel. We also used DS-100s in some areas as well,’ notes Mr Bricknell. ‘We managed with one system and the same set of speakers to combine a standards-compliant voice evacuation, five-star quality commercial background music system and room combining in a conference environment.’
One of the factors which made this kind of installation possible was the casino’s IT network, which connected the various sites of the project. ‘We applied the principle of sharing BGM sources between the casino and hotel. Although they are one campus, they are physically separated buildings, says the Avitech manager. ‘Being a casino, they have a very high-end IT infrastructure. Basically, Cisco switchers everywhere, proper fibre redundancy, they’ve done it properly. They’ve got two VLANs for us, a CobraNet VLAN and a control VLAN, so we live on their network backbone and we move audio if we want to around the entire complex. They can turn on a wireless mic somewhere and route it to anywhere.’
While this formed the main bulk and the technical highlight of the 18 month installation, there were also several other side projects which added to Avitech’s work, as well as the casino’s audio network. ‘It ended up about five or six projects in total. Apart from the BGM and evac, we had the sports bar inside the casino which they stripped and rebuilt a bit bigger,’ recalls Mr Bricknell. ‘We put the Bose Room Match line array system in there, we did lighting, TVs, Crestron control of the venue, Allen & Heath iLive mixing desk and also AudiaFlex in there, so that’s also on the audio network. We can route casino audio into the sports bar, or if they are having a big draw, take the stage audio and route it out onto the casino floor.
‘We also did an audio upgrade around the lake,’ continues Mr Bricknell. ‘There was already a background music system that just plays the local radio station who are housed on the premises as well, but they needed better sound for the fountains. We put some Bose 402s around the lake and another AudiaFlex to run that,’ he explains. ‘We pick up music from the fountain scheduling system, and whenever that happens we kill the radio, ramp the levels up and play that. If Sun International’s IT network extended to there we could have put it on the network as well.’
Mr Bricknell describes the various projects as all rolling into each other. ‘For us, we did a lot of work. Fortunately I know the AudiaFlex product very well and I did most of the design files and DaVinci GUIs in that. It was part of the job I really enjoyed. I spent many hours of the job on site, which as a business-owner maybe I shouldn’t be doing. But it was good fun.’
The successful conclusion of the multi-phase project has drawn a great deal of praise. ‘We are very happy and proud of the end result,’ smiles Mr Bricknell. ‘The biggest thrill I’ve got out of it is the wow factor of being able to take what was a problem child for the casino operations staff and give them something that just works.
‘The Sun International project managers believed we could do it and it was a real pleasure working with them,’ continues Mr Bricknell. ‘This was the big project in the area that everyone wanted to win. It’s a big reference project for us now. What’s happening is, they’ve got a 2,500 sq-m conference venue that they are marketing and they are showcasing the work we have done.’