Leading visitor experiences company Merlin Entertainments is making extensive use of Audinate’s Dante audio networking technology at a variety of its London attractions, including sites on the city’s South Bank – the Coca-Cola London Eye, Sea Life London Aquarium and Shrek’s Adventure! London.
Opened in July 2015, Shrek’s Adventure! London is ‘one of the ‘heaviest’ attractions that Merlin has created in terms of A/V,’ according to Coca-Cola London Eye Senior Show Services Manager, Simon Casey, who has also been involved in other Merlin AV system projects. For Shrek’s Adventure! London, Dante handles audio processing and playout as part of a set-up that also features Medialon show controllers, 7thSense media servers, BSS DSP, Crown amplifiers and Vue Audiotechnik loudspeaker systems.
‘The 7thSense media servers have all got built-in Dante Virtual Soundcards and are outputting audio across the attraction site to the Crown amplifiers,’ Casey explains. ‘Dante gives us the flexibility and ease of use that we require to send audio over large distances and an existing network infrastructure. We can also send audio to other areas of the site – for example, messages for the ticket hall can be relayed to those waiting in the ride queue area at the Coca-Cola London Eye.’
Previous positive experience of usong Dante at other Merlin sites drew Casey and team to the same solution for Shrek’s Adventure! London: ‘Quite simply, Dante is incredibly easy to configure,’ Casey says. ‘Using the click-and-go power of Dante Controller to configure our network, and add/remove devices as we wish, Dante allows us to spend time enhancing the guest experience – not fiddling around with clunky cabling and running diagnostics.’
In the case of Shrek’s Adventure! London, this need for simplicity was made more acute given the complexity of an installation requiring intensive interaction between performers and projections, as well as close synchronisation of audio and video: ‘With Dante what we needed was rock-solid reliability – and that’s what we got,’ says Casey.
Meanwhile, at the Coca-Cola London Eye, background audio of various kinds is being processed via Dante Virtual Soundcards as part of a system that also includes Focusrite RedNet Ethernet-networked audio interfaces, Symetrix Prism DSPs and Attero Tech break-out boxes: ‘We chose to use Dante because of the significant distances between different areas in which we wanted the same sources to playout – it simply couldn’t have been done with analogue copper cables. Once again, Dante has saved us a lot of headaches,’ Casey says.
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