Harman Professional distributors GSL Professional LLC provided the BSS Audio devices to Bond Communications. These audio tools function on most of the Tower's 164 floors, and GSL's marketing & PR manager, Glen Kershaw, states, "We were selling these products to Bond pretty much up until the day of the opening - and I anticipate that the after-sales support will be ongoing following the opening."
Bond Communications AV package manager, Omar Chataw, confirms that his company was asked to provide an integrated, fully-redundant A/V system and the scope of work included networking, cabling, security, home automation, AV conferencing, two-way radio system and master control system.
Chataw knew that the design specification called for a CobraNet backbone, which would allow any input to be routed to any output over standard Ethernet.
His introduction to BSS Audio's catalogue came when he was asked to trial the scalable DSP system on a nearby satellite project - the Lake Hotel. "GSL Professional provided really good support in terms of both knowledge and service," he said. "The BSS Audio specification was excellent - in particular the newer Soundweb London products with the digital audio bus, which also offered four times the processing capability."
Chataw's team constructed the network around large quantities of the newer Soundweb London family members, launched in January 2008. These include the BLU-800, BLU-320, BLU-160 and BLU-120 - products which feature a 256-channel, low-latency, fault tolerant bus. It works on Cat 5e or Cat 6 cable and allows a direct connection between devices over distances of up to 100 meters. This provided Omar Chataw with another compelling reason for adopting the BSS Audio platform.
The building contains seven separate control rooms (and a master), each with a number of Soundweb London products (18 of the newer devices are used in total).
The Soundweb London digital audio bus is used throughout, allowing each zone to have its own fault tolerance. The central control room uses two BLU-800, two BLU-160 and five BLU-120 devices to handle a matrix of over 100 inputs and 100 outputs, taking feeds from the main music server and local line inputs.
Each of the other control areas house either two or three amp/processor racks - giving a total of between 22 and 25 for the entire construction. An AMX control system is employed in various zones throughout the system which interfaces seamlessly with the Soundweb London devices via RS-232 to allow quick and full control of the audio system.
(Jim Evans)
