America’s largest charity casino, The Brook in New Hampshire offers more than 500 casino gaming machines, a poker room and an array of table games. The sprawling 75-acre property also boasts an outdoor deck, state-of-the-art showroom, banquet space and a full-service restaurant.
Since acquiring the property in 2019, Nevada-based Eureka Casino Resort – the only fully employee-owned hospitality company in the US – has invested millions of dollars in renovations and enhancements to make The Brook a complete entertainment destination for anyone seeking live entertainment, fine dining, or Las Vegas-style casino gaming. When it came to upgrade the A/V systems, the casino opted for Allen & Heath’s AHM audio matrix processor to provide scalable sound distribution while keeping end-user controls friendly and simple.
‘The AHM system was recommended to me by our A/V Integrator,’ says The Brook Director of Engineering. ‘When I did my own independent research, I was extremely impressed. AHM also had a lot of fantastic reviews online. We needed a rock-solid audio distribution platform with a ton of flexibility, and AHM fit that bill in every way.’
The Brook, which is a 45-minute drive north of Boston near the New Hampshire border, suffered intelligibility and sound level issues with its previous DSP, and sought an alternative that would provide clarity, intelligibility, consistency, and the scalability to meet growing processing needs.
The venue is divided into 16 zones – with several more to be added in the near future – each fed with different blends of three microphones, six cable TV receivers, two music players and four computers. Because of the variety of events and styles of entertainment across the location, the casino needed the option to have certain inputs push out across all zones, while also allowing each zone to operate completely independently on source and level.
With an AHM-64, The Brook has plenty of room for current growth projections and any plans that may develop in the future. An AR2412 networked stagebox provides an expandable 24 mic/line inputs and 12 outputs for the system, in addition to the 12 local inputs and 12 outputs on the AHM itself. A Dante module was also added to the system for future-proofing and further expansion.
Five Allen & Heath IP-1 wall-plate controllers are sprinkled throughout the venue, giving one-knob management of source selection and level control. The facility’s management team plans on adding additional Allen & Heath IP controllers in the future to give the staff even more control over the distributed audio.
With the new system in place, The Brook team took a short lesson from the designers on how to use the system and was quickly off and running, noting that AHM was intuitive and simple, not only to physically install and wire up, but to then configure the software to their specifications.
Thanks to AHM’s audio playback feature, The Brook now runs audio ads throughout the day. ‘The system lets us load in an audio file that will describe to our guests our upcoming promotions, concerts, and events,’ a brook employee reports. ‘It triggers throughout the day every 90 minutes. The system is so configurable that it lets us select which zones the ads run in, have a different volume per zone based on that zones acoustic environment, trigger them at the set times, and then go right back to our normal programming. It is absolutely incredible what we can do with the AHM.’
The casino has received positive feedback from both employees and guests, resulting from the now consistent daily audio experience.
More: www.allen-heath.com
