One of the largest and most complex wireless audio system deployments in the Middle East has called on a Sennheiser wireless conference and translation systems for all meeting and conferencing facilities

‘The Sheraton Doha spared no expense and every system that has been used is absolutely first class,’ says Esber Nasrallah, Operations Manager for Q2 Advanced Technology Contracting (part of the Doummar Group of Companies), which handled the A/V aspects of the hotel’s renovation. ‘It was decided to use wireless systems in order to deliver maximum flexibility in terms of mobility, portability and scale. The hotel wanted to be able to add or remove microphones and receivers across the 12 expansive conference rooms as per guests’ requirements.’

Besides accommodating more than 200 UHF channels without intermodulation and interference issues, the team had to convince the regulatory authority in Qatar that it would not operate in certain frequency bands. The planning required to accomplish these tasks was aided by Sennheiser Intermodulation Frequency Management (SIFM) software, which allowed the team to input the frequency ranges and receive a detailed frequency distribution plan for the building. As there is no frequency overlapping of channels, the Sheraton Doha can move transmitters about freely. The stringent wireless security requirements were overcome by a combination of Sennheiser’s proprietary signal encoding and industry-standard 128-bit AES encryption.

The project also used 120 Sennheiser 3000/5000 Series microphones with Neumann KK-105 capsules and 400 ADN-W wireless delegate units for the portable conferencing systems, as well as 4000 Sennheiser HDE-2020 receivers and 21 SR 2020 transmitters for the translations systems – representing the largest and second largest global deployments for the Sennheiser conference and translation systems respectively.

On top of the technical requirements, the system had to be commissioned and in a five-month window: ‘We flew in experts from our headquarters in Germany and scaled our production to meet the project demands,’ says Sennheiser Middle East Technical Sales Manager, Ryan Burr. ‘Even with the extremely tight deadlines, we did not compromise on quality and attention to detail. We have received no negative feedback on the installation and no calls to assist or remedy any defect in the installation. This is despite the fact that the system is being used for daily events at the iconic venue, which I believe is best testament to the quality of the systems and the implementation.’