Attracting 1.8m visitors each year, the Cincinnati Zoo places a high value on its support of education, outreach and conservation, and aims to give every visitor a unique experience with wildlife that is unavailable elsewhere. What the zoo lacked until recently was a reliable audio system for delivering messages throughout its extensive campus.
‘Innovation is one of our core values and something that we take very seriously,’ says Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Gardens VP Marketing & Communications, Chad Yelton. ‘It informs everything we do, from our sustainability programme and green initiative to how we build habitats, to the people that we hire and every event that we put on here at the zoo. The desire to innovate drove our search for a better audio and security solution, and that search led us to [Powersoft’s] Deva.’
In addition to delivering music throughout the zoo campus, the multi-point Deva system also provides communication and messaging: ‘With as many guests as the zoo attracts, we recognised the need for the paging system that could clearly and effectively deliver messages throughout our space,’ says Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Gardens IT/AV Director, Dutch Mulholland. ‘I immediately saw the potential of all this in a wireless unit… so we decided to investigate it as a possible solution for our security messaging needs.’
Mulholland and his team built a heat map of wireless access point coverage in the zoo and correlated that with projected Deva coverage and determined that it would be a viable solution. ‘We wanted to have as close to 100 per cent coverage as possible with our audio messaging,’ he says.
‘With our old conventional sound system for emergency paging, it was always a fight to set up wiring, and then we’d deal with having squirrels chew through our cables, or even the horticulture destroying a lot of the cables that are in the ground. We wanted to get away from having our amplifier and signal processing off somewhere and go with something that was all in one and had zero cabling going to it.’
The zoo began with two Deva units to see how they would work with the existing network infrastructure: ‘The first two Devas were a proof of concept, and ran them for a year and tested them on our infrastructure. They worked flawlessly, so we moved ahead with more of the product.’
This meant installing 50 Deva units in time for its major Festival of Lights holiday event. ‘Festival of Lights is an event that has been going on for 35 years,’ says Yelton. ‘It started out as a small event with a bunch of luminaires lighting the pathways and a couple trees that were lit. Now we have more than 3m lights and displays of all kinds.
‘One of the big pushes this year was to make sure that our sound quality throughout the park was on point,’ he contines. ‘Having music playing really helps give you that warm holiday feeling, which was really important to us to capture.’ Playing music with Deva is both significantly easier to use and more versatile than the antiquated playback system that predated it, which involved starting separate CD players in multiple locations around the zoo.
‘With Deva, there’s so much control and convenience – each unit can be powered on or off at the touch of a button, all remotely,’ Yelton says. ‘We do a tree lighting every year to kick off the Festival of Lights that uses its own music separate from the park music. That used to require having to make phone calls to have music turned on or off by people in different parts of the park. Now we can do that at the touch of an iPad via the web app, which pretty incredible. With the Deva app allowing us to mute and unmute, control volume, and deliver speciali’ed playlists and Bluetooth, we’re totally set.’
The Deva Control Panel app is key to unlocking the unit’s flexibility and remote control features. ‘The app is really great,’ Mulholland confirms. ‘In the past, we had to go to a closet where our switches and amplifiers were just to turn a zone down or mute it. If we had a problem with something, we wouldn’t know about until it was too late, allowing amplifiers or speakers to burn up. With this app, not only does it allow us to customise our volumes in each zone remotely, which saves a lot of time, but it also allows us to monitor the Devas’ performance.’
Following the Festival of Lights, the zoo plans to deploy a further 50 Deva units throughout the park, including ten Deva HD units. ‘Distributing the additional units will allow us to set the base volume of each even lower, ensuring that you visitors won’t be overwhelmed even if they’re standing right below one of the speakers,’ Mulholland says. ‘We will use the Deva HDs specifically for some of our key exhibits.
But the zoo reckons to only have scratched the surface of Deva’s capabilities: ‘Our concern here at the zoo has always been the safety of all of our guests, employees, patrons, neighbuors,’ says John Lusignola, Senior Security Operations Supervisor. ‘In addition to improving our emergency audio messaging capabilities, Deva’s camera will allow us to have wireless video surveillance in some areas that might not otherwise have been possible due to limitations with running cabling. Video combined with motion detection and lighting makes Deva a powerful tool for ensuring a safe zoo experience.’
More: www.powersoft-audio.com
