Our largest installation so far this year has been the Sparwood Rec Centre. First opened in 1984, it consists of an arena, pool, curling rink and lounge, a large meeting hall, and several fitness rooms. The sound system had the original installation, then it was upgraded sometime in the 1990s, however the existing equipment was showing its age after 25+ years.
As with many sound system installations from the 1990s, the sound system in Sparwood consisted of a number of small independent systems, without the ability to provide paging or background music throughout the building. Our accepted proposal consisted of upgrading the vast majority of the sound systems with new equipment and a centralized QSC Core 110f digital signal processor.
The existing equipment consisted of home stereo equipment in the fitness areas, as well as numerous aging Peavey speakers and amps as was typically installed in the 1990s.
Old existing rack with a lot of Peavey equipment in it
The new main rack!
The new upstairs hall rack
New arena rack
The QSC system consists of a touch screen at the front desk, which allows master volume control of each zone, and the option to play background music in the various zones. The paging mic zones can be selected with the default setting being an all-page, in case of emergencies.
We removed the old Soundsphere speaker from the pool, and installed four weather resistant Community R.35 speakers instead. We also reconnected their existing ceiling speakers around the perimeter of the pool, which added sound to the public seating areas.
All of the existing speakers were removed from the arena, and a central cluster was installed consisting of four Community 15” 2 way speakers. To augment the central cluster, six Community R.35 speakers were installed with three delay zones over the spectator seating areas.
Sparwood Arena Central cluster
Sparwood spectator speakers
The new main rack was reused, however the new equipment took up far less space than the old equipment did.
A new feature to Sound Solutions’ installations is the addition of a Bluetooth receiver that can be labelled with respect to the room the Bluetooth receiver is in. We mate the Bluetooth receivers to a Factor mic and music input plate. With two adjacent rooms, it’s now easy to determine which Bluetooth receiver to pair to, as we label them ‘Fitness BT’, ‘Weight BT’, etc. The new Bluetooth receivers also have a superior range than the original ones did.
Factor mic and music input plate with a Bluetooth receiver integral to the unit.
New Prologue 8” 2 way speakers were installed into the weight and fitness rooms, providing better sound coverage and clarity than the existing home stereo speakers did.
Prologue AS-108 speakers in the weight room.
The large upstairs hall received a Panasonic 5000 lumen laser projector, with both wired and wireless video inputs. We installed 18 new in-ceiling speakers for better fidelity and coverage than what was provided by the old original speakers from 1984
We added a Shure conferencing system so that the wireless council chamber conferencing units could be brought into the hall for meetings too large for the council chamber itself.
The Panasonic laser projector mid-installation. 5000 lumens means the screen can be seen with all the lights on in the room!
The installation took 2 ½ weeks total to complete, and we gave the District of Sparwood a generous allowance for their old sound equipment on trade-in. The staff was pleased with the overall improved sound quality, and the ease of the overall operation of the sound system.