Long overdue, renovation of the lobby and atrium at the Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas marks the adoption of the hotel as the NFL XLV Super Bowl headquarters.
With the gutting of the existing lobby of the 1,606 room hotel and creation of an 11-storey atrium _ with water feature and Media Grill+Bar – the 11,000-sq-ft space required an unobtrusive, distributed sound system for music playback in the area.
To handle the job, R2W’s Dallas office took on design and installation of the sound system for the atrium as well as other systems required by the renovation – not least, 25 custom light fixtures throughout with space within for loudspeakers. ‘Our job was to come up with a system that would provide the audio quality that the hotel required while working within the space limits we were given,’ says R2W Senior Engineer, Jim Nelson. ‘I thought of Tannoy immediately. They have always been very helpful in creating custom audio solutions and the sound quality of their components is terrific.’
The custom light fixtures are square pillars, roughly 6-ft high. The lower two-thirds of the pillar are illuminated and the top of the box is capped with a LED fixture aimed upward. The area allocated for the speakers falls between the light and the cap, providing a very compact space approximately 6-inch high by 12-inch wide and 12-inch deep. ‘It was a clever way to distribute sound throughout the atrium very unobtrusively,’ adds Steve Reed, Senior Account Manager at R2W. ‘Conduit was run under the floor to each location for the lights making it easy to add in the wiring that the audio system required at the same time.’
After evaluating their options Nelson and Reed determined that the Tannoy 4-inch Dual Concentric driver (4DC Contractor Kit) would be the ideal solution. The 4-inch (100mm) driver with crossover is a contractor kit used in custom design situations such as this. The drive unit comprises of a mid/bass cone and a 0.75-inch HF unit with neodymium magnet assemblies. The mid/bass and tweeter sections of this constant directivity driver are coincidentally aligned to be a true point source, ensuring a wide and controlled dispersion for optimum coverage. Seventy-volt transformers were added to the units for the distributed system.
Because the lighting fixtures were being custom built, Nelson and Reed also worked with the lighting designer to make sure that the product would not only work, but also fit. Ultimately two 4-inch drivers were installed in each fixture. ‘We built the drivers into each fixture and enclosed them with an attractive grill around all four sides of the pillar,’ Nelson explains. ‘You wouldn’t even know they were there except for the music which was exactly what the hotel wanted.’
More: www.tannoy.com/pro
