dbx Professional Products® ZonePRO™ 640 Outfits an Aquatic Adventure
dbx
Posted 2006-05-21
dbx Professional Products®, a Salt Lake City-based manufacturer of professional signal processing products and a division of Harman International, announces a recent installation at the new Aquatic Center in Ventura, CA. During the Center’s design phase, it was decided that great sound was a crucial ingredient, both for enhanced enjoyment of the park and to assure clear, highly intelligible announcements for security and emergency purposes. This design goal was met when the dbx ZonePRO™ 640 Digital Zone Processor was used as the audio central controller. The ZonePRO 640 is now providing highly discrete zoned audio throughout the new Ventura Aquatic Center in a compact, easy-to-program and cost-effective system.
The $22 million Ventura Aquatic Center is a state-of–the-art facility that offers users of all ages and skill levels the best in water sports. The Center features a 1.5-mile walking trail perimeter, large grassy malls, two 25-foot water slides, a Children’s area with two wading pools as well as a 50-meter Olympic-level competition swimming pool complete with scoreboard.
“This was a challenging project,” comments Lara Barrett, Designer for Muzicraft, a systems design/install company with four offices in Southern California and the installation contractor on this project. “The sound had to be very clear and intelligible everywhere in the park, and the entire park needed to be divided into four distinct audio zones, each with its own music systems. However, the entire system had to be tied together for crucial uses such as paging and emergency and security announcements. It was a complex design and installation.”
It was also an incredibly successful project, thanks in large part to the dbx ZonePRO 640 Digital Zone Processor, which functions as the heart and brains of the entire audio system that also includes JBL Professional® Control 30 speakers and Crown® CH Series amplifiers. “Every one of the requirements we had to meet for the project in terms of zoned audio was met by the ZonePRO,” says Steve Grider, Technical Specialist at Sound Marketing West, which partnered with Muzicraft on the design and installation effort and provided programming and fine-tuning services. “The system also had to be easy to operate by a variety of park personnel with no audio technology training. Furthermore, it had to be flexible, to allow for changes to the system down the road. The ZonePRO delivered on all of that.”
The dbx ZonePRO’s performance has a way of making people use it again and again on challenging projects. Barrett had previously used the ZonePRO for a luxury hotel installation project in Santa Barbara last year. “The ZonePRO performed perfectly there and it did the same here,” she says. In addition to the ZonePRO 640, Barrett used the dbx ZC-7 wall panel Zone Controller to dynamically change page routing of the system making it easy to select where pages would be sent and adding enormous flexibility to the system. “Programming the ZC-7 was incredibly simple, easy and accurate,” Barrett notes. “And the ZonePRO is very compact, taking up half the size of other controllers, so it was a big space saver in the rack. The ZonePRO made a huge contribution to how well this project turned out.”
