The Sheraton Doha hotel in Qatar has deployed a complex Sennheiser wireless audio system across its entire meeting and conferencing facilities. The five-star hotel project is one of the largest deployments in the Middle East and was handled by the DOUMMAR Group.
“The Sheraton Doha spared no expense and every system that has been utilised is absolutely first class,” said Esber Nasrallah, operations manager for Q2 Advanced Technology Contracting LLC, a member of the DOUMMAR Group of companies, which handled the entire AV portion of the hotel’s renovation. “It was decided to use wireless systems in order to deliver maximum flexibility in terms of mobility, portability and scale. The hotel wanted to be able to add or remove microphones and receivers effortlessly across the 12 expansive conference rooms as per guests’ requirements.”
In addition to the challenge of accommodating over 200 channels into the UHF spectrum, the team had to convince the regulatory authority in Qatar that it would not operate in certain frequency bands. To accomplish this Sennheiser’s specialised Intermodulation Frequency Management (SIFM) software was used, which allowed the team to input the frequency ranges and receive a detailed frequency distribution plan for the building. The wireless security requirements were overcome by a combination of Sennheiser‘s proprietary signal encoding and industry-standard 128-bit AES encryption.
The project saw the deployment of 120 Sennheiser 3000/5000 Series microphones with Neumann KK-105 capsules. Also utilised were 400 ADN-W wireless delegate units for the portable conferencing systems, as well as 4000 Sennheiser HDE-2020 receivers and 21 SR 2020 transmitters for the translations systems. This represents the largest and second largest global deployments for the Sennheiser conference and translation systems respectively.
Q2 Advanced Technology Contracting LLC and Sennheiser Middle East managed to plan, supply, commission and test all these systems in a five-month timeframe. Ryan Burr, technical sales manager for Sennheiser Middle East, explained: “We flew in experts from our headquarters in Germany and scaled our production to meet the project demands. Even with the extremely tight deadlines, we did not compromise on quality and attention to detail. We have received no negative feedback on the installation and no calls to assist or remedy any defect in the installation. This is despite the fact that the system is being used for daily events at the iconic venue, which I believe is best testament to the quality of the systems and the implementation.”
Mr Jean A. Doummar, CEO of the Group, stated: “The success of our endeavour at the Sheraton is the result of a quality-centric management team and spirit and a tight collaboration between our partner Sennheiser, our back office in Beirut and front office in Doha, orchestrated and led by our operations manager Mr. Esber Nasrallah.”
