The Boston Park Plaza Hotel and Towers, a landmark since the Roaring Twenties, has been inducted as a member of the Historic Hotels of America. But the sound system used for its six sizable ballrooms was a source of frustration to the hotel staff.
A pair of seven-foot racks housed enough power amps to fry a dozen eggs while idling, and their opaque user controls flummoxed even the most audio-savvy hotel staff. At its root, there was no core control and no time alignment, equalization, or limiting.
Audio/video integrator Balanced Input helped "green" the Park Plaza by replacing the old 96-space rack system with a smaller, more energy-efficient system using Ashly DSPs and amplifiers – without burdening local landfills with the entire existing sound system, either.
"The bones of the old system were quite good," said audio consultant Mark Waker, principal at Balanced Input, of the audio system installed in 1996. "EAW boxes and Electro-Voice ceiling speakers, some tweeters needed but nothing major," Waker said. "But most of the amps had issues, and the processing was simply missing. I knew we could save the speakers but the system desperately needed modern control and amplification to deliver."
The hotel is configured with one equipment closet for the two larger ballrooms – the Imperial and Plaza – and a second equipment closet for the remaining four smaller ballrooms – the Georgian, Arlington, Berkeley and Clarendon ballrooms. Each of the closets contains a seven-foot, 48-space rack. Between them, 10 amplifiers powered the speakers.
"The fact is, these systems idle most of the time," said Waker. "They don't do much most of the day, but then when they have to work, well… they have to work! At any rate, they spend most of their time using energy to make heat, which the building's A/C system then has to use energy to cool down. With power-hungry amps in there, it was a big waste."
To each of the replacement racks, Waker added an Ashly ne24.24M Protea DSP, "fully loaded" with modular expansion cards to offer a tremendous amount of processing power within two rack spaces.
Each of the larger ballrooms received an Ashly ne8250 eight-channel power amp, whereas one ne8250 served all four of the smaller ballrooms. In addition, MP3 players and power conditioners added features that were absent from the older system. Despite this, the rack size for the larger ballrooms shrank from 48 spaces to just 20, and the rack size for the smaller ballrooms shrank from 48 spaces to just eight.
"Ashly amplifiers are ‘energy savers,' but unlike most other ‘energy savers,' they actually sound good," said Waker. "We wouldn't use them if they didn't. In fact, we use Ashly PE Series amps and Ashly Protea processors in our live rig. In addition, Ashly products are resolutely reliable, which greatly reduces service calls – a benefit to both the hotel and us, as getting into Boston is no picnic."
Power and reliability, of course, comes with a price, but in this case, "they helped us to come in below the figure that the hotel had budgeted for, so we helped the hotel spend that money on LED lighting."
The old systems used to draw in excess of three amps while idling. The new systems each draw less than one amp while idling. That represents a conservatively-estimated 60 percent reduction in power consumption, aside from the lower load placed on the A/C system.
With Ashly processing, moreover, any hotel staff member can use the system. "They just plug in a mixer or a mic, and clean audio comes out, no feedback, no fuss," said Waker. "We also installed Ashly wall remotes so that banqueting staff can adjust levels without needing to call a tech."
