Digital
signal processor brings high quality flexible sound to suburban hotel
Mariott Suites finds DSP
technology hospitable to meeting rooms
 Listen
carefully as you walk in the front door of the Marriott Suites Hotel
in Deerfield, Illinois. You will hear something special. It's the rich,
full tones of a top quality sound system that winds through the hotel,
from foyer to restaurant and on to the hotel ballroom and conference
area. But it's not just the superior sound quality that makes this system
a cut above the rest. Based on a SoundWeb digital signal processor,
this audio system offers convenience and flexibility rarely seen in
hotel audio.
Superior sound
 Since
United Visual installed this system a year ago, the Marriott Suites
sales staff has found it to be one of their biggest selling points when
promoting hotel meeting space to business clients. "The clarity of the
sound, the pitch, the depth of the music-everything's better," says
Director of Food and Beverage Operations Chris Kontos. "The sound doesn't
fall on the ground and die like it used to." While it may be the superior
sound quality that sells the client, it's the incredible ease of setup
and programming that impresses Kontos. When the day's schedule calls
for the large conference room to be divided into smaller rooms for separate
meetings, there's no more mad dash to put up the walls, reset each room's
sound system and make sure everyone's got the right signal. When the
partition walls roll out to divide the room, the SoundWeb is already
programmed to divide up the audio signal and send it to the appropriate
room.
Simple set up
On the wall of each room
is a control panel, called a "jellyfish" because of the greenish glow
of its backlit LCD panel. United Visual programmed the jellyfish to
allow the business client to choose an audio source and adjust volume
during a meeting, but not to allow anyone without a password into the
heart of the system. Sources available to the client include a CD player
and the hotel's 300 CD library, a VCR, his own laptop and microphones
clients or staff can connect to wall plates in each room.
For staff, the setup process
is simple. When dividing up rooms, hotel operators enter their password
into the jellyfish, press the buttons or, say, Room A and Room B and
the system automatically combines the audio for those two rooms. The
nearby ballroom is also on the system. Staff can keep it separate or
share the same audio as the conference rooms. It's a far cry from the
days when every room had to have its own equipment rack, amplifiers
and microphones and each room had to be reset manually. "I think the
key to this program is its incredible flexibility," says United Visual's
Dale Bottcher, who sold Marriott on the system last year. "This is a
Windows-based system, so we did the programming, plugged into the system's
serial port, and dropped in a custom program designed just for Marriott."
United Visual also set the audio quality put out by the SoundWeb. "Everything's
in the program--crossovers, delays, filters, levels. But we gave them
the extent of control that they needed in order to serve their clients."
"We're in the hospitality
business," says Kontos. "You need to serve the customer, because if
you can't do that you might as well get out of the business…What United
Visual brought to the picture was customer service. You can call them
one night, tell them you need something for a meeting the next morning,
and it will be there," he continues. "They really stand behind their
product."
Marriott has been happy enough
to come back to United with additional projects. "We put this same sound
system into our restaurant in Oakbrook," says Kontos. "There was no
carpeting, just tile floor, but the richness of the sound was just as
good. It's been outstanding everywhere we've put it." Sounds like Marriott
and the SoundWeb system are making beautiful music together.
|
