Cold Fusion

Cresta’s new conference centre includes 2 conference rooms that are divided by a partition that can be folded away to make one large room. Outside the glass fronted foyer, which lies along side the conference rooms included is an outdoors decked area, perfect for sunset cocktails.
Cresta wanted installed all the audio video equipment that is expected in today’s conference centres in a manner that was both flexible enough to accommodate the variety of different room set-ups that their design allows as well as being user friendly—for both staff and conference delegates.

One of the first obstacles we had to overcome in the designing of this system was how to route the audio into two conference rooms independently of each other and then—at the touch of a button and a folding away of the partition have the two rooms operate as one.
After doing a bit of research we found a pre-amplifier purpose built for the task, with microphone and stereo audio inputs, the ability to route audio through to up to 8 zones, and, the most important feature for this project, the ability to group 2 zones together and operate them as one large room as if it were a single zone.

The next step in the process was to simplify things by adding an RTI control system. The control system connects to all the equipment in the system allowing it all to be controlled from, in Cresta’s case, a wall mounted keypad in each of the conference rooms. From each keypad every aspect of the system can be controlled. Users can select which rooms they wish to control, and select what audio, video and microphones are active within each zone.

One of the final steps in the installation of the system was the set-up of each conference rooms sound processors which both help to improve the sound of any audio being fed into the rooms and can reduce microphone feedback (that annoying screeching that results when mics pick-up their own amplified sound) To perform the complicated process of testing, measuring and calibrating each room we employed the services of a sound engineer, Brendon Sole, who recently set-up and opened his own recording studio in Harare.