This content is brought to you by Audiocourses dot com
HOUSTON, TEXAS: The Houston's restaurant chain prides itself on providing its patrons with a unique dining experience centered on a fresh selection of
music.
Although it would be simple to buy a "canned" feed of music from some
provider, the result would be too stale for Houston's. Instead, they have a
full-time, dedicated audio programmer on staff who hand picks every song,
carefully considering its flavor and the segues between songs.
Thus, it was especially frustrating when complaints started flowing into the
head office that the sound systems at two of their Dallas locations were far
worse than adequate. Diners at one table would be complaining that the
system was too loud and booming, while diners a few tables down were
complaining that they could scarcely hear the music! Worse, each of the
decade old, fully-analog systems were cutting out in some zones, leaving
patrons with nothing but an unarticulated wash of music from the rest of the
restaurant. What's the point of carefully selecting music if no one can
appreciate it?
Enter Grammy-nominated studio engineer, AV contractor, studio designer, and
all-around audio renaissance man, Paul Dexter. With over twenty years in the
business and golden ears that would shame the RCA terrier, Dexter was called
in to assess the situation. What he found was, by modern standards,
bordering on pitiful. The old systems were based around analog rack mixers
that had been set up to crudely balance each zone. One of the restaurants
had a live piano that switched out Houston's custom mix by way of a physical
switch. "The audio from the piano bore almost no resemblance to the
pre-recorded audio," reported Dexter. "The old system had no way to balance
it!"
Dexter worked out a model centered on the Symetrix Zone Mix 760 that would
give each restaurant consistent and excellent sound throughout and, when
installed in other restaurants in the chain, consistent sound from
restaurant to restaurant. He replaced the existing speakers with
approximately 45 Tannoy Di5dct and Di6dct 70-volt surface mount speakers in
the dining areas and eight Sonance 623tsq square recessed speakers outfitted
with 70-volt ransformers for the halls, lobbies, and restrooms. Two QSC
CX204v four-channel amps provide 200 watts of power per channel for the six
zones in each restaurant. CWC Solutions of Rancho Cucamonga, California
performed the installation.
Regarding his choice of a 70-volt system over its higher fidelity
alternatives, Dexter suggested the industry should reassess its position:"Audiophiles always say that 70-volt is so much worse than 8-Ohm, and I used
to be on that side of the fence having heard great sounding 8-Ohm systems
and crappy sounding 70-volt systems. But in preparation for this job, I did
a test. I placed a switcher between a CD source and a Sonance speaker that
selected an 8-Ohm path or a 70-volt, twenty-watt tap transformer path. I
could switch it back and forth a thousand times and only hear the slightest
difference - a difference so slight that it would be completely lost with
even a tiny bit of ambient noise in the restaurant. I think the real reason
70-volt systems are usually noticeably bad is because the components are
poorly made. But poorly made 8-Ohm systems sound bad, too!"
But if Dexter had stopped at only new speakers and amps, Houston's problems
would have remained because the old system lacked zone control and zone
processing. The Symetrix Zone Mix 760 is the first product in Symetrix'
Integrator Series, and it benefits from the wealth of DSP know-how housed in
Symetrix' SymNet brand of open-architecture DSP units. The Zone Mix 760 is a
lower price-point DSP unit that is expressly designed to meet the processing
and distribution needs of restaurants, hotels, sports bars, and night clubs
with four mic/line level inputs, eight stereo line level inputs, six
outputs, mic pre-amplification, compression, AGC, matrix mixing, paging,
feedback elimination, filters, and equalization.
However, DSP units are a lot like cars in that the final sale often depends
as much on the way it looks and feels to the user as it does on the power
under the hood. "What sold Houston's on the Symetrix Zone Mix 760 was the
Symetrix ARC-2 controller, which kills the controller of any other
manufacturer," Dexter said. "They were blown away by how cool it looks! By
comparison, everything else looks cheap." With only three buttons and a
simple display, the ARC-2 shields Houston's employees from the true
complexity of the system. For each zone, they select a source and a volume.
Simple. One controller runs an entire restaurant.
Dexter programmed the Zone Mix 760 with a Macintosh running Windows
virtualization. "It was easy. I didn't even need time to learn it," he said."We had been up all night installing the system and they were going to open
for lunch in three hours. I did some routing, bypassed a few modules that
weren't needed, and tweaked the compression, EQ, and filtering to provide
nice, even coverage across the whole restaurant."
The results are stunning and bring Houston's sound system in line with the
effort they expend bringing the right music to their patrons. "I went back a
few days later for dinner with my wife," Dexter said. "We enjoyed a half
hour of recorded music before they switched over to the piano. It used to be
painfully obvious when they switched because the tone and volume of the
piano was so different from everything else. But we didn't notice until a
few songs in!" Houston's is so pleased they ordered two more 760-centered
systems for locations in Irvine and Los Angeles.
