Gaylord Palms Hotel & Convention Center - Orlando FL
The Gaylord Palms is the first resort in Central Florida to focus entirely on the meetings and convention market. It is designed to accommodate groups from 10 to 10,000. The 400,000-square-foot convention center features Florida's largest hotel-based exhibition hall (at 178,000 square feet) and second largest hotel ballroom. Forty-six (46) of the sixety-one (61) breakout rooms are located between the 28,690-square-foot Sun Ballroom and the 46,650-square-foot Osceola Ballroom. The Osceola Ballroom features a fully functional theatrical stage 40 feet deep and 100 feet wide, topped by a 50-foot-high proscenium that is equipped for a keynote speaker or a complex musical production.
Audio Visual Innovations was given the vast responsibility of installing the audio/video/network and cable infrastructure for the entire Gaylord Palms facility. With help from Joe Kurta of TechSpa, a Peavey MediaMatrix backbone was installed to handle all audio routing over an audio network that consists of a million feet of cable, 2466 speakers in 398 zones, 568 plate locations and 114 audio, video and fiber patch panels located in 75 equipment racks.
The Gaylord Palms is a complicated MediaMatrix installation requiring meticulous programming abilities for smooth operation. Five (5) Mainframe 980nts control the massive convention center side of the hotel, one (1) Mainframe 980nt controls the hotel side of the resort, and two (2) additional MediaMatrix Miniframe 208nts are used for the spa and the two main boardrooms. Saving the hotel significant labor and material expenses, CobraNet was used to handle all audio routing to amplifier rooms. The facility receives 12 channels of 24/7 background music off of a single one-meter satellite dish with various local sources as backups for a 'rainy day'. The design criteria called for a routing system with the ability to plug a microphone in to any mic jack in the resort and distribute that signal to any zone, or set of zones, anywhere in the facility.
All controlled from eighty-three (83) Crestron control panels; twenty-nine (48) CobraNet bridge devices were used to distribute digital audio between the IDF rooms (the smaller, shared audio and data rooms) and the main audio control rooms. Loudspeakers from five (5) different manufacturers are driven by 236 Crest CKS and CKV series amplifiers. Controlled from four main control centers and 17 substations, the system allows the digital and analog audio signals to be routed and rerouted from any one of the Crestron touch panels. The entire system can be tested and monitored by a single operator, and the CKV and CKS amplifiers were also fitted with Crest's digital signal processing module. As a result, every one of the 236 amplifiers in the system are able to be load-tested, performance-tested and configured from a single control panel by a single operator in a matter of minutes.
The Osceola Ballroom can be separated into 15 rooms and corridors. When the Sun and Osceola Ballrooms and the 12 City Hall meeting rooms are divided for smaller events, the audio for audio routing and controls are reconfigured at the Crestron panel for the smaller rooms. Each room has a Crestron LC-1000 touch panel with controls for master volume, mic and line levels, background music choice and level and room link/unlinking control. Each of the controls is contained on three levels of password protection, which allows different levels of training and access for users. With control panels in the rooms and the MediaMatrix interfaced with the NexSys, the hotel staff can quickly reconfigure the rooms for events, with the audio routing and signal processing parameter reconfigurations being the least time-consuming aspect of the job. The Osceola Ballroom's default setup is as a performance room. In this setting all the internal walls are collapsed and stored, and the individual rooms are combined into one large performance hall. For an onstage performance, the FOH sound system is brought in as needed, usually by the in-house A/V company. The sound company does not have to add and configure additional delay speakers to the room: they are already built into the ceiling and configured into the system.
When the Osceola is in a combined state, 100 ceiling loudspeakers in 50 zones are configured into seven delay rings. After the FOH system is plugged in to the system, with one press of a button the Crest NexSys program reconfigures and adjusts the amp DSPs. The loudspeakers can be reconfigured from speech support to a delay ring configuration for FOH support, which distributes a more uniform sound as far as 200 feet from the stage, across the massive 46,650-square-foot ballroom. That enables a smaller, lower profile FOH sound system to be used for stage events, eliminating a hot stage output that could overwhelm the audience members closest to the stage and negating the need for a costly set of delay speakers. Small and medium-size groups have the ability to enjoy a big, impressive sound on a smaller budget. The FOH engineer simply inserts his or her additional EQ and effects for the FOH system at the mix position. Any FOH person is going to want to touch and feel the signal processing, as opposed to using settings that have been predetermined behind the scenes.
Providing support for network design, MediaMatrix and Crestron, Joe Kurta (TechSpa President) had the goal of helping make the network and back of house infrastructure (including the DSP systems) completely transparent. It combined all aspects of our experience — networking, cabling (both fiber and copper), DSP configuraiton, system documentation and control systems interfacing. It was a perfect fit.