LENEXA, KANSAS:  Founded in 1884, employee-owned Kiewit Corporation is now one of the largest contractors in the world, with annual revenue in excess of $6 billion and distributed offices throughout the United States and Canada. The company recently built a new $18 million building for their Kiewit Power Engineers & Constructors divisions in Lenexa, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City. Kiewit Power Engineers design everything from nuclear power plants to hydroelectric dams to renewable energy solutions, and the Kiewit Power Constructors turn their schematics into reality. The new building, which opened in June, accommodates some eight-hundred employees and houses a divisible conference room with audio processing delivered by a powerful, but affordable, Symetrix Zone Mix 760.

The developer, Block Development Company, hired local A/V powerhouse Progressive Electronics to design and install the audio system for the roughly 4,000 square-foot conference room. Audio/video service manager and systems designer Chase Nugen took on the project and delivered an intuitive, straightforward design for a fraction of the price that a comparable system would have gone for only a few years ago.

An Electro-Voice REV wireless microphone system provides a flexible front end so that the layout of the room is not constrained by wired mics. Their outputs feed directly into the brains of the system, a Symetrix Zone Mix 760. Before hitting the Zone Mix 760, outputs from a dedicated PC, a laptop interface, a DVD player, and a VCR player feed into an Extron switcher-scaler so that audio remains synchronized with video selections.

The Symetrix Zone Mix 760 provides intelligent control of room combining and dividing, so that breakout groups can meet in separate areas of the room using rollaway walls. A Crestron touch-screen control panel at a podium makes switching inputs and controlling room division intuitive and foolproof. In addition, the Zone Mix 760 handles all room equalization, auto-gain, compression, and limiting for the Electro-Voice 70-volt amplifier and ceiling speaker system.

“For smaller installations, the Symetrix Deuce 722, Zone Mix 760, and Automix Matrix 780, are my ‘go-to’ boxes,” said Nugen. “The flexibility and DSP power can’t be matched for anything close to the price.” For larger jobs, Nugen relies on Symetrix’ SymNet brand of open-architecture DSP solutions.

 But beyond that, Nugen enjoys working with the people at Symetrix. “Let’s face it,” he said. “Buying a DSP is a lot like buying a car. Any car you buy will get you from point A to point B. Most DSPs will get the job done – some more gracefully than others. At Progressive Electronics, we don’t think about buying products so much as we think about buying the people behind the products, and the people at Symetrix are peerless. They offer service and engineering support that go way beyond our expectations.”