A series of reception rooms in a major Sydney venue receive an AV overhaul.
Doltone House is a major venue and catering management company servicing a huge number of venues across NSW.
Club Marconi in Western Sydney hosts a set of busy function rooms for Doltone House. Catering for weddings, awards ceremonies, corporate presentations and similar events, its spaces require reliable, high-performance AV and lighting.
JOIN THE CLUB
The multiple function hire spaces can handle many guests, with up to 950 in the largest room at Club Marconi. Resident electrical experts, WED Group, were chosen to provide comprehensive lighting and AV systems for the reception rooms.
As with most busy hire venues, seamless integration and a simple control layer for users are critical factors. System reliability is also crucial.
Matthew Joyce is in charge of Audio Visual and Technical Services for WED. As regular players in the club market, they have a fair idea of what is required. “We understand how the clubs work and how staff like to use things,” says Matthew. This led to a design and construct framework, where they could guide the end client with their experience of similar scenarios.
SYSTEM PREFERENCES
The three main rooms feature extensive architectural lighting, consisting of over 650m LED strip and multiple pendant fixtures, all controlled via DALI in CBUS. Matt explains that they “program CBUS to do the heavy lifting. All the scenes are in CBUS, so I’m just sending simple group commands from RTI.”
WED Group chose RTI for the control layer, which Matt is all for. “I’ve always used RTI. It’s got a heap of functions and can do quite a lot. Having tried other systems, I found other control systems quite convoluted compared to the workflow I can do in RTI. Particularly ID11 with it scalable graphics, layers and system manager – I haven’t found anything that I can’t do with it. So, we’ve made RTI our go-to for all control requirements.”
Audio is handled with a combination of QSC and Biamp products, but Matt finds these easy to integrate with the control system. “The RTI driver works really well with Biamp Tesira.”
Hearing loops are a Williams AV IRSY11 IR and two Williams AV IRT2 IR hearing augmentation systems. With infrared, “you don’t have to mess around with huge amounts of delicate tapes under carpet and getting damaged. IR works great and it gets the job done.”
Function rooms have multiple Panasonic laser projectors. These shine onto Grandview screens that “are all motorised and part of the macros.” This is achieved with simple IR control. For Matt, “IR just works and it’s simple.” He finds the same with the Grandview screens.
INTEGRATED
Not all jobs fit under a sole distributor umbrella, but having key units that integrate nicely with third parties makes the whole job more seamless. Matt and WED find RTI very easy to integrate with the other products they are using, including Just Add Power AVoIP which pairs effortlessly with RTI.
Matt loves the support he gets. “Amber Technology is one of my favourite suppliers, for sure. They’re great and they’ve got pretty much everything.”
Feedback from the end client has been excellent. Matt reports that “We’ve had minimal calls for maintenance, which is a good sign for three function rooms.” These rooms get hammered hard, and reliability is a priority, keeping everyone involved very happy.
