Haron Robson at Fairfield RSL

The brief from the client was to create high quality background music and speech in defined areas. The AV designers approached the project with an over-arching plan, instead of treating each zone individually, resulting in a clean-changing audio program in transitional zones and no sound spill between the restaurants and gaming areas.

The problem the AV designers were faced with was something that couldn’t be changed: physics - most of the rooms were open areas with no walls or doors, which renders traditional AV design somewhat challenging. Additionally, there had been many changes in the clubs’ AV systems over the last few years, so there was no cohesive system in place which worked for the venue as a whole. To achieve the brief, the Haron Robson AV design engineers made clever use of accurate speaker locations, shading and noise masking. 

The particular zones most problematic were the gaming areas and three adjacent restaurants. The sound quality and levels within the individual areas were inconsistent, and between the zones the sound bleed proved distracting. The existing background music source was a combination of multichannel audio cards in  PC, iPods and CD players, all of which sounded distorted and the variation in volume between tracks was untenable. The hub of the problem was the never ending disagreement between the computer engineers and AV engineers about the quality of PC-audio.

Working with Emstream (background music provider), Haron Robson demonstrated the difference in sonic quality of DAC’s (Digital Analogue Converter) in preference to PC Audio cards. The improvement proved astounding and prompted the installation of 6 channels of computer audio via 6 ARX-USB DI (direct input) boxes.

The heart of the system is a Netmax 24:24 Matrix mixer with three Dynacord 8-channel amplifiers, resulting in state of the art sound quality distributed to and through the speaker networks, enhanced equalisation and levelling of the music sources. Further management of the installation allows the steering of sound towards the targeted audience area and away from the surrounding zones, further minimising sound spill

The speaker networks are a combination of ElectroVoice EVID 8.2’s and 8.2 HC’s, with the narrow dispersion quality of the 8.2 HC’s utilised at the edges of adjoining zones to reduce program spill.

Upgrading the wireless microphones to ElectroVoice RE-2’s with condenser elements improved intelligibility of the paging system and created a clean & clear sound above the ambient noise of the gaming lounge

The end result is that patrons can walk from the gaming area into the Summerhouse Restaurant and beyond, and the audio program changes cleanly as they progress from one area to the next, with no sound spill. The sound levels are even and the paging system is discreetly effective, even within high sound-traffic zones.

Haron Robson