Project Outline
The four star Clayton Hotel Birmingham has 174 bedrooms and is located in the heart of Birmingham city centre. This large hotel offers a wide range of hospitality services for visitors, guests as well as for business and commercial events.
Various existing audio systems were in place at the hotel (believed to have been installed in 2012). Most of these systems were performing poorly and with limited coverage, especially within some of the communal guest / bedrooms and also large sections of the staff and back of house areas.
With the site maintenance team, we conducted a series of surveys to establish an inventory of audio system/s equipment, speakers, coverage and performance. With these details were were able to advise and plan for upgrades and improvements.
Audio Applications
- Background Music (BGM)
- Events and Conferencing
- Security Messaging
- Public Address (PA, Paging / tannoy)
Audio Specification & Technologies
- IP Audio Matrix with local wall inputs and zone control
- IP audio message player (security announcements)
- IP microphones
- 100v and IP speakers (utilising mixed media audio technology)
Installation Details
Working through the hotel management and maintenance team we conducted a series of surveys on the site to obtain a baseline of capability and limitations / issues with the existing installed audio systems. These surveys were extensive and also sensitive – care and attention to guests at all times, testing schedules limited.
We identified that much of the existing audio and speaker cabling was available for re-use. However, large scale changes were required to re-design the audio zones to better match the coverage areas and client requirements. Cabling alteration and extension works was carried out in line with new audio zone specifications. A new IP audio zone matrix was installed to provide improved audio routing capability.
A number of public announcement messages and security / informational audio messages were created using a mix of audio studio recordings and natural ‘text to speech’ software conversions. The resulting MP3 audio message files were stored on a series of IP based message players. Secure access to these was made available via web browser – direct and scheduled playback.
