Transportation Venues

Products

Transportation Venues

Transit Station

Overview

Ambient noise in transportation facilities changes minute by minute, sometimes second by second. Intelligibility is imperative but often hard to come by. For years Symetrix has delivered superior tools for handling public address, ambient noise compensation, and audio distribution in train stations, airports, and a host of other transportation terminals. Our SPL computers, priority selectors and mixers, FIR filters, AGCs and loudspeaker managers ensure messages are always heard above the din.

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Jupiter App Note: Transportation Venues

Spotlight Installation

Contemporary Airport Terminal- New York, NY, USA

Products: SymNet 8x8 DSP, SymNet Express Cobra, ARC-2

In contrast to most new airport terminals, which make about as much of a splash in the popular imagination as a moth in a swimming pool, JetBlue's new Terminal 5 at JFK Airport in New York is a full-on cannonball. Apart from high flow-through security, free wi-fi, a children's play area, and other unabashedly modern amenities, T5 boasts twenty-two restaurants. JetBlue enlisted New York City's celebrity chefs to design the menus, such that a meal at Terminal 5 is closer to an experience in New York's trendy Tribeca than it is to one in the usual airport fare. Consistent with the authentic flavors served up from their kitchens, all of the T5 restaurants possess full hi-fi sound systems with A/V design and custom playlists from El Media Group, the celebrity chef of music programming. To realize a full auditory experience, El Media Group relied on Symetrix SymNet DSP in every restaurant.

El Media Group's founding partner Ernie Lake spent over a decade in the heart of the music industry before parlaying his expertise in the heretofore-uninspired world of background music. Lake wrote, remixed, and engineered tracks for pop music icons such as Britney Spears, The Backstreet Boys, and Mariah Carey, among a ton of others, and earned multiple Grammy nominations for his efforts. Since music programming clients kept asking for advice on audio design, El Media Group officially entered the world of A/V design and installation. Unlike many integrators, Lake's introduction to Symetrix was not through its SymNet line of open-architecture DSPs, but rather through its studio processors.

"They wanted real hi-fi audio in the T5 restaurants," said Lake. "No 70-volt background stuff... all eight-ohm with even coverage and subwoofers." El Media Group used QSC amps for both their transparent sound and their ability to work around the clock without so much as a hiccup. They chose Tannoy subwoofers and dual-concentric loudspeakers to drape patrons in rich lows and silky highs. Thus creating a full sonic spectrum to complement the full spectrum of flavors coming out of the kitchen.

Apart from the usual collection of tools found on most modern DSP units, Lake was especially interested in giving T5 proper auto-gaining. "The ambient noise level was guaranteed to be predictably unpredictable," he said. "We auditioned several of the top brands in open-architecture DSP to see which would give us the most natural and effective auto-gaining. As it turned out, we didn't need to be so nuanced. The SymNet system was the only one that actually did proper auto-gaining. The others simply didn't work as they should have." Symetrix has a long history of developing effective auto-gaining technology. The Symetrix 571 SPL computer has been performing auto-gaining in airports since before open-architecture DSP was a twinkle in an electrical engineer's eye.

Each restaurant, and each of five retail stores to boot, possesses either a SymNet 8x8 DSP or a SymNet Express DSP unit for input conditioning, EQs, filters, dynamics, and zone control. Coupled with intelligently-placed detection mics, they also perform the aforementioned auto-gaining. Most of the restaurants are sufficiently removed from the main concourse that paging overrides are unnecessary, but for the few that require it, integrating the SymNet system with the terminal's sound system was easy.

A MiniMac computer in each restaurant delivers the custom play list that was designed by El Media Group. The play list changes automatically. Despite everything that the DSP is doing, Lake deliberately made the user interface bare bones minimal. Each restaurant has a SymNet ARC-2 wall panel with an eight-character backlit display, a menu key, and a set of up/down keys. From the ARC-2, users can change the relative volume (an average volume around which the auto-gaining revolves). In rare instances, they can select another input source, but this option has seldom been used.