The word "metropolis" doesn't easily roll off the tongue, unless of course, you're a superhero and you're talking about protecting your hometown. Just about the only other place in the "real world" where the term seems appropriate is Las Vegas – land of skyscrapers, megaplexes and roller coasters on top of skyscraper megaplexes.
In what was designed to be a reprieve from the city's flash, the 76-acre CityCenter Las Vegas is home to a handful of hotels like the 61-story Aria Resort & Casino, the Mandarin Oriental Las Vegas, Vdara Hotel & Spa and The Harmon Hotel. Of course, sprinkled into each of those properties are dozens of ballrooms, casinos, executive offices and relaxation facilities. That's not to mention the extensive list of retailers, restaurateurs and entertainment options for visitors.
Metropolis, Indeed
Of course, a project like this is a dynamic challenge for every company involved. Factor in the economic climate during the construction, the fact that MGM Mirage (half of the joint venture that built the location along with Dubai World) nearly declared bankruptcy during the process and the expedited time frame that every vendor worked under and you've got yourself an event.
"The most interesting thing to me was the short timeframe of the entire project," reports Darren L. Smith, former senior consultant with PMK Consultants. "We basically had two years start to finish on the design and more or less build. I started on the project in May of 2007 and we had bid documents out in August 2008. Then it was awarded and built in seven or eight months. We finished the rest of the project, which is all the casino areas and front of house spaces in 80-plus different venues, retail areas, restaurants and issued those packages in March of 2009. They started to build in July of 2009 and completed in December."
Smith was responsible for the entire A/V system design at the casino and convention center at the ARIA and Vdara, including all FOH and supplementary systems. After being let go from PMK, Smith has joined the Technology West Group team.
For Technology West Group, a two-year-old company that has already worked on a handful of noteworthy installations in town, this was an interesting project to accept. "We were bidding against a few big companies and we ended up picking up five pieces of work out of the whole thing," reports Technology West Group's Brad Cornish. "We found out that we'd won the first portion in April of last year. At that point we had to rent new facilities just to do the fabrication of the racks. From April to September it was all fabrication, drawing and management in the field. Then from about June to December, it was overseeing the installation of the gear."
Technology West Group, one of three primary AV contractors on the project, was responsible for the Racing and Sports Book in the Aria, the main spa treatment rooms at the Vdara, the Cirque du Soleil retail store and the executive offices and conference rooms. The company's specific responsibilities included commissioning, programming and documentation. The installation was a union project, so TWG helped to manage that side of the project.
The other integration and installation companies were from the Las Vegas offices of Ford AV and AVI-SPL.
A Tale of a City
With a laugh, Cornish says there were two challenges on this project. "There's the technical and then the client itself. MGM almost declared bankruptcy in the middle of the project, which put lines of credit in jeopardy. That was tough, especially for us as a young company.
"Technically, we had all of the control and audio systems residing on one network," he continues. "The centralized network allowed for great remote operations and management for the client. They can review projected lamp hours or turn on a conference room for a meeting remotely, a mile away from where it's going on."
Both Cornish and Smith point to the implementation of the BSS Audio Soundweb London with BLU-Link as the crucial piece of gear to facilitate that network. "They say this was the largest place where it's been implemented property-wide in the history of the BSS line," remarks Cornish.
"If it hadn't been for that, I don't think this project would have been as successful as it is," Smith adds. "Even using Media Matrix, it still wouldn't have allowed us to spread between 15 or 18 different rack rooms where we have equipment, because of the limitations of the bus architecture. But with BLU-Link, where you can throw it on a fiber converter and send it anywhere you want it, it really opened up the possibility for design and allowed us to scale back the size of having massive head in rooms."
In fact, Smith points out that was important since just about the only thing lacking in a location like this is free space. "We were able to put one or two equipment racks in an IT room, which saved us a lot of real estate," he says. "And we were preached at from day one on the project that real estate is king in Vegas. You can't demand large rack rooms. You get whatever space is left over after they get their square footage for gaming. So, you get shoved in to whatever corner you can fit in to. Between the BLU-Link and CobraNet channels we were able to get enough traffic going back and forth to serve every need and function that we had."
One final count had the amount of BSS Soundweb London BLU-800 units at 750, along with 700 networked Crown amps and something in the neighborhood of 5,500 loudspeakers. A smattering of Lab.gruppen C Series amps with a NLB 60E NomadLink Bridge and Network Controller was also used. Almost all of the audio was routed via the BLU-800s to Crown CTs Series amps with monitoring and control done via Harman Professional's proprietary HiQnet using System Architect software.
One of the other most-used pieces of gear on this project came from Crestron and that company's line of touch panels and processors. In fact, Crestron's TPS8L Wired in Wall Touch Panels were used in the majority of the rooms to enable control the system. "The Crestrons gave us a lot of control since it's all IP-based where the touch panels are talking to the processors over Ethernet," Cornish reports. "It's all on the client's network and not a separate system."
Spas and Sports
The 65 spa treatment rooms at the Aria were one place where the Crestron gear came in especially handy, since every room featured an iPod dock and a CD player that enables a masseuse to select their own background music. Those tracks then ran from the treatment rooms through the BSS boxes for processing and then back to the room, played through JBL boxes.
That was done, Cornish reports, "to condense the processing. That way, they could pick a device or ancillary resource to route to their room, and through the processing it became an any-to-any situation."
The massive integration in the spa area is just one example of the size of the entire system. "The sheer magnitude of the systems and the coordination with the IT staff on audio, video and control was probably one of the biggest things on the project," Cornish says. "The convergence of IT and AV was brought to the front of my mind on this project."
On the audio side, there are over 100 Control 300 Series boxes in the room that have been powered by Crown CTS amplifiers and driven by the London in that room. "There is a lot of processing from the London, because any of the sources from any of the 50 satellite boxes and the race track tuners, need to be routable in stereo or mono to any of the areas in the venue." In addition to the Control 300 boxes, there are two hangs of Renkus-Heinz ICONYX boxes on either side of the main video wall.
The Aria ballrooms, which were designed by Smith, are slightly more conventional as far as installation. That doesn't mean they aren't impressive or networked to the rest of the property, though. In fact, Smith designed the spaces with about a thousand permanent hang locations scattered around with input/output panels (analog, digital and network) available directly above the catwalk. "You could literally hang anywhere you wanted," he says.
Or, you could use the JBL VerTec 4887 rig (eight boxes per side with subs on the floor) that he speced in there. "You can really tailor the room any way that you want," he states. "Every single ceiling speaker, which are JBL 12-inch 360 speakers, is set up on an individual amp channel and as individual DSP channels, so that you could literally EQ each individual speaker and delay it from whatever side or corner you want."
While this may have been the debut of this type of huge networked system, Smith believes it's the future. "We took this approach mostly because of the real estate issue," he says. "But, I think with the new technology this is going to become the standard way of doing things, where it's centrally located and you're driving signal out to your destination."
