In order to make the ceremonies a success, the island was equipped with a series of public address systems, with QSC's Q-Sys control chosen to provide tourists from all over the world with "crystal clear sound reinforcement".
A Q-Sys network provided coverage to every corner of the island, with a powerful Q-Sys Core as the engine, and Q-LAN's low-latency Gigabit Ethernet network implementation as the transmission network.
There were eight control rooms on the island, two of them based centrally and the remainder as satellites. Two Core3000s provided back-ups for each other in the two central technical rooms. This redundancy meant that should any failure have occurred in one, the system would automatically have switched to the other. Other networking audio interfaces were placed in the auxiliary control rooms to feed signals to the nearby loudspeakers.
The system was programmed with the background music running according to the playlists and transmitted to the decks, fountain area, dock and gardens. These were played out through 534 specially treated weatherproof QSC AD-S loudspeakers.
Aside from providing the background music function, the QSC Q-Sys was also linked to the emergency evacuation and fire alarm system.
In the security centre, fire centre and service counter, 11 PS-1600H networked page stations were installed; this enabled operators to broadcast paging announcements manually.
The eight control rooms on the island were equipped with large quantities of equipment, distributed to the many different zones including underground. All equipment on the network was under the command of the Q-Sys.
As planned, following the Games the Haixinsha Island is being transformed systematically to a large garden, and the underground area will be reconstructed as a museum.
(Jim Evans)
