Forty years on from its establishment, Lotte Hotels & Resorts is striving to become one of Asia’s top three hotel brands by 2018. Improvements to its facilities’ infrastructure is a key consideration, with Lotte Hotel World in Seoul recently replacing an outdated audio routing and distribution system.

‘The customer had suffered from errors such as signal dropouts and the occurrence of noise during the middle of an event,’ says Sound Solution Marketing Manager Lisa Lee. ‘Reliability was an absolute priority for the new installation, as well as support for the now very widely used Dante technology, which was not compatible with the outgoing system.’

Covering public spaces including the hotel’s multiple ballrooms, the new system incorporates redundant operation using ten Symetrix SymNet Edge open-architecture Dante-scalable DSPs for control routing and distribution of live sound via 80 analogue inputs and 80 analogue outputs. Recordings can be made in two principle ballrooms – Crystal and Emerald – using Cubase software, Midas Pro2C and Pro6 consoles, and Klark Teknik DN9650 network bridges.

‘The system is designed to allow the capture and distribution of audio from/to eight different ballrooms located on various floors of the hotel,’ Lee explains. ‘In contrast to the old installation, the new system with SymNet Edge and bullet-proof Dante networking provides far better stability of the system as well as a superior and highly intuitive user control interface.’

Despite the scale of the project at Lotte Hotel World, work was completed in two weeks to the reported satisfaction of both the hotel operator and its staff. According to Lee, ease of zone control, straightforward audio distribution and accessible DSP status monitoring information are among the advantages to have particularly impressed the technical personnel.

‘They are very pleased with the convenience and stability that the new Symetrix installation provides,’ she confirms. ‘The overall verdict is that the flexibility and power of the new system represents a huge step forward for the hotel’s audio routing and control. Moving forward, the operators now have a plan to purchase further Symetrix units – specifically, Zone Mix 761 zone mixing, paging and music management solutions from the Integrator Series – for use in its restaurants at some point in the near future.’