Retail – Superior upgrade for Meadowhall Centre’s Oasis Dining Quarter

Content and systems provider tsg Media is finding the combination of BSS Soundweb London DSP and Crown amplification a winning one, as it seeks packaged audio solutions for customers in the bar, restaurant, retail and leisure sectors. The Midlands-based company recently completed a prestigious fit-out at Sheffield’s Meadowhall Centre, using audio equipment supplied by Harman Professional’s UK and Eire distributors Sound Technology. tsg Media was brought in at Meadowhall to help the operators accommodate a greater number of dining experiences as part of a £7m redevelopment of the food court into the rebranded Oasis Dining Quarter. tsg has incorporated a branded integrated design around the main central circular area. The brief to tsg Media’s operations director Ivan Marsden was to vastly improve the existing sound. The audio equipment had been tied to the PA/VA, and was attempting to play music through a system essentially designed for voice messages. As part of the new fit out, the operators also wanted the old large format video screen removed and a new mezzanine level added.@page_break@ 
Given full music system autonomy with the new specification, and faced with an inherently high reverberation time in the open, circular food court, tsg opted to deploy BSS Soundweb London DSP. Judicious programming of the system gain structure and delays would do much to tame the building’s reverberance. Tasked with providing evenly distributed sound across three zones (the general area, the portable stage and the mezzanine) tsg specified a pair of cost-effective Soundweb London BLU-100 devices, with fixed 12-in/8-out configuration, adding remote BLU-8 touch controllers in both the control room and at the stage, with a simple BLU-3 wall panel for level and source select at mezzanine level. For power, the installation employs a combination of Crown CTs 2000, 1200 and 600 amps. Music is pumped out from tsg’s own tsg ProMedia ams system and a tsg ProMedia TLF solid state music player, programmed over the internet. Different EQ/delay parameters have been preset for the respective zones, resulting in a remarkable upgrade that has already received many plaudits. “BSS and Crown tools are part of my armoury — and what I go into battle with every day,” said Marsden. “Individually they are great but they work particularly well together. We were working on a tight budget and by using BSS Audio’s BLU-Link [a 256-channel, fault-tolerant bus] and standard, inexpensive Cat5 cable, we were also able to save around £12K on conventional cabling alone. As for Crown, I know it will go on working forever and a day … it’s totally reliable.” www.soundtech.co.ukwww.tsgmedia.com