Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo’s mission is to save wild animals and their habitats. With in excess of a million visitors each year, it recently opened the Banyan Wilds tiger exhibit is and required an loudspeaker system suited to its that accommodated the shallow and wide dimensions.
The team behind the installation comprised A/V design consultancy AEI, and integrator AVI-SPL: ‘We’ve worked with both AEI and AVI-SPL for about a decade and they’re really good at understanding our quirky needs,’ says the zoo’s, IT Systems Administrator, Jay Wallace. ‘We’re a strange hybrid of a theme park and a naturalistic experience, and they both get that.’
In order to enable zookeepers to address visitors at a comfortable, conversational level, while keeping the sound contained within the area, AEI Senior Consultant Thom Mullins chose Tannoy’s QFlex 16 speakers. ‘The exhibit has a limited area where zookeepers train the tigers and interact with the audience,’ he explains. ‘We needed a speaker that could be relatively short, easy to mount and hide, and still provided adequate pattern control.’
The design methodology he used was the same as that for concert halls – the system needed to cover both the close and far fields of the exhibit, so visitors could hear the tigers clearly no matter where they were in the pen. Wired microphones were placed up high around the pen, and as with the zookeeper audio, the sound was routed through the DSP and played back over a pair of loudspeakers attached to the glass.
As a line array, the QFlex 16 enabled the Zoo to prevent the sound spilling into adjacent exhibits. According to Grant Nelson of AVI-SPL, the QFlex 16 was the right solution for five reasons: ‘It’s very easy to install, all the speakers are self-contained in one box for an aesthetically-pleasing design, it provides almost 180° width dispersion, beam-steering control allows the audio dispersion to be adjusted programmatically, and because this exhibit is outdoors, it was important to be able to weather-proof the speakers.’
Tannoy’s VNet software was used to steer and tune the speakers. Feeding the audio on the front end was a configurable DSP running on the Zoo’s CobraNet/Dante network. When the zookeepers speak into their wireless microphones, the sound is brought back into the DSP, and played through the loudspeakers.
Getting visitors as close as possible to the tigers in a naturalistic habitat was important to the Zoo: ‘Rather than create a cage or put the animals behind an artificial barrier, they chose a layered Plexiglas,’ Mullins says. ‘Getting rid of the visual barriers made it possible for visitors to really feel like they’re right there with the tigers. We were able to mount the QFlex in a way that blended with the environment, not take away from it.’
In addition to its suitability for the tiger exhibit, the QFlez system was straightforward to install: ‘We literally took it out of the box, turned it on, did a little tuning to control the audio dispersion, and it was ready to go’ says Wallace. ‘It sounded great right out of the box.’
