SOLUTIONS: PRAIRIE MEADOWS, IOWA Back on track
This successful racetrack and casino has been added to gradually over the years. Unfortunately its audio system had as well, to the point where it was no longer fit for purpose. Tom Bradbury explains how a new solution was found
Biamp Tesira is used to distribute audio around the the racetrack area, as well as the 168-bedroom hotel, casino, lounges, restaurants and concert venue at Prairie Meadows
[INSTALLED]
AUDIO Biamp Tesira system Biamp Vocia system Renkus-Heinz TRX81 and TRX121 Complex Conic two-way speakers Community R2-52Z-CTO and R.5-66TZ speakers TOA F-2352CU2 and F- 2852CU2 ceiling speakers
[ABOUT THE INSTALLER]
Mechdyne is a consultant and integrator with seven offices around the world: four locations in the US (including the HQ in Iowa) plus Canada, UK and Abu Dhabi
Prairie Meadows was a rare audio-only project for the company; it is more usually involved in visualisation, 3D and collaboration technologies
HORSE RACING first came to Altoona, Iowa in 1989. The Prairie Meadows racetrack was the brainchild of local businessmen looking to boost the local economy following the farm crisis in the American Midwest. The facility has increased in
size and scope over the years – growing section by section and adding a slot-machine casino in 1995 along the way. Today it offers guests a 168- bedroom hotel, an adjoining 24-hour Vegas-style casino, live and simulcast horse racing, lounges, restaurants and a busy concert venue. Prairie Meadows Racetrack and Casino Hotel is a locally managed non-profit operation that has given more than $1 billion in taxes, grants and charitable donations to support the State of Iowa and its residents. AV integrator Mechdyne
was called in to renovate the racetrack audio. But when Mike Pedersen, senior staff engineer, went in to assess the situation, he found an old, daisy-chained audio system that had been added to in a piecemeal fashion and failed to provide acceptable facility- wide audio coverage. “They had been adding to the system in a not very
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organised way,” Pedersen says. “For instance, they might have had a line of high-voltage speakers and added more speakers without paying any attention to how much voltage was left or how they were going to maintain those additional speakers. It was a serious issue for them. They couldn’t be sure when or if certain equipment was working,” Television sets had been
pressed into service as additional loudspeakers, but on race nights the IT team had to walk around with remote controls and adjust the volume on individual TVs throughout the racetrack and casino areas. Not only was this time-consuming, it worked against the image that Prairie Meadows was trying to create as the premier racetrack in the region.
COMPLETE REPLACEMENT Because there were no drawings of the system, the Mechdyne team had to take everything apart piece by piece and determine what went where and how it was all connected. During this process, it quickly became clear that the entire system needed to be replaced. “We had some discussions about
reusing some of the cabling but it was quickly decided that, without having any idea where it came from or where it was headed, it would have taken more time than starting afresh,” he explains. At the same time the
racetrack audio was being improved, Prairie Meadows was completing a new expansion in the casino that would also need audio. Knowing this, Mechdyne was able to show the management at the complex the value of investing in a facility-wide system with distributed networked audio throughout the racetrack, casino and hotel areas. “When we got there, every
cable for every speaker came down to one central location in this building – there were some really long speaker cable runs. We wanted to get away from that and distribute the amplifier banks around and get them closer to the speakers. A network-based system made perfect sense to do that,” he says. In order to fulfil the
background music (BGM), networked paging and voice evacuation needs across the entire facility, Biamp Vocia was selected for its scalability and ease of use. Other
manufacturers’ products were considered, says Pedersen, “but for a system that we knew needed paging and emergency paging, the Vocia system really stood out as being designed for that particular purpose”. Biamp’s Tesira was also selected because, he says, “it’s their high-end top-of-the-line system for processing, so that became the backbone”. The Tesira system enables the Prairie Meadows IT team to easily customise zone presets, access hundreds of available lines of audio inputs and outputs, and control the entire system remotely or from a single control room location. Because of the combination
of AVB-based Tesira and CobraNet-based Vocia, there are two networks throughout the facility. “There’s a CobraNet network that’s used for some of the unique things you can do with Vocia, and there’s a backbone AVB system for some larger transfers of audio from area to area.” The three AVB-1 cards in
the Tesira SERVER-IO unit support up to 420 x 420 channels of mic/line level inputs and outputs. The four SCM-1 networking cards enable Prairie Meadows to
Customers include government laboratories, energy companies, universities, design and manufacturing firms, and armed forces
interoperate the Tesira system with non-AVB equipment running on CobraNet, such as speakers and microphones. Nine SIC-4 modular analogue input cards each provide four channels of mic/line level audio input, while the 12 SOC-4 output cards each provide four channels of mic/line level audio output. Four EX-MOD modular
expander cards increase the available channels of audio I/O, and can be added to as the facility continues to grow. Eight EX-IN and one EX-OUT expander provide four channels of input and output respectively, while two EX-IO expanders each provide two channels each of mic/line level inputs and outputs. Fifty-five ANC-1 ambient noise compensation devices allow the Vocia system to adjust output levels automatically in response to changes in ambient noise levels. These devices process the ambient noise information and send the data to the 27
www.installation-international.com
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