Harbour Station Sound System

[warrbeat]

What are we on now... 4?
Anyway, by this time the mounts for the small perimeter speakers that we absolutley needed... weren't the right ones. There was no way in Hell the JBL 25T speakers could be surface mounted an point straight down... there are 13 suites each with a pair (a little tip to the end of this one... 25ts are sold in pairs in the box) and the Alpine Room has an additional 9 speakers running the length... 22 boxes of 90degree Omni mounts arrived 4 days later... not too bad except there's 2 to a box....
At this point since they were't sent back, I got some GREAT coat hooks!

The cabling out to the speakers over the bleachers and the ice ended up running plenum (which changed the fire rating on the cable if your paying attention). Since there was a need to run pipe from the trusses to the cluster boxes and all of the other speakers over the bleachers had a box and pipe running from the steel our Electrician ended up running all of it... Stan was thrilled!

The perimeter speakers (37 of them) had to be mounted 2' from the back wall to get any proper angle and since the project was already 4weeks over, we had a local contractor to come in and mount unistrut to the top ledge of the back wall and using threaded rod and the old omniball mounts they did everything but put the speaker on and attach the wire.

Speaking of wire, all of the speakers are run as homeruns to the amp room. with 137 speakers all of which are now fire rated covered cable, if the label on the amp room end would come off you couldn't just tug on it to find out which one it is.... electrical tape and illedgible sharpee scribings were on the floor everywhere after the wires were finally pulled through the roof of the amp room.
More to come about the amp room when we get into patch panels and the actual patch....

The phone rang one day from my Install Leader to inform me that the Music Sto...re was being bought out by a box store I'll refer to BS but not to worry... nothing can go wrong...
There were a few hitches including the end of a few distribution contracts to product lines such as Harmon Kardon and any other Pro Audio ditributor you could think of. We went from being able to buy pro product to fuzzy boxes in three signatures on the contract.
Also another new twist, the proceedure for purchasing ran through the Music Sto...re a Division of BS central purchasing and lucky us... we were assisgned the old store's Drum Purchaser to take care of our needs... Oddly enough he didn't know that much about wireless antennae distribution, fibre optic Media Converters o cable for that matter etc...

Also worth noting Long before the Merger I was assigned the Store Manager of the Saint John store to "head the project" locally. The Absentee Installer just couldn't seem to keep track of things from Halifax.
For the Record... I called the District Manager ************************ and told him flat out that the local manager couldn't take over the local aspect of it because of a few reasons
a) He knows nothing about pro audio
b) He knew nothing about how the system was installed
c) I thought there was a tremendous conflict of interest as we were friends

Important to note that officially from coast to coast, BS has never had a proaudio install division nor did Music Sto...re.

Coming soon....
Integration of the existing patch and 70 volt systems
Amp Room and paging
The Sloth and Hound hunt
End of a shotgun marriage....
Game 1

[Mathieu Benoit]

I absolutely love this story.

In other news, I'm in the market for some good sturdy coat hooks for my place, can you "hook me up" so to speak? Thanks.

[RoadDog]

[warrbeat]

Round 5

Ommission discovered.... crucial to the story I did forget to tell you that the the Install Leader got approval on changing the smaller speakers utilized in the design from EV to JBL product but the Consultant would not budge on the EV SX300s. This set our Install Company through the roof... He had to purchase all of the EV 300sx speakers through his main competitor... SSF OUCH!

Integration of the existing system and 70 volt
One of the stipulations was that we would utilize as much of the old 70 volt system and patching as possible without jeoprodising the quality of the new system... stray ground issues with the old system etc....
There were approximately 100 70 volt speakers scattered around the building all driven from Altec Lansing amps. The dressing room and office are run through volume pots in various areas as well.
Most of the 70 volt was run back to a series of terminals strips with coding which the building had very little information about. The first step the Install Leader did was try to simply send 1 signal through all of the speakers by simply jumping all the strips together. The amps didn't care for the amount of elements tied into them. They needed to be broken into their specific areas of control as well. He put the tracing of these existing speakers on us to do so we hired a local guy to come in. He requested the lines to be labelled and a map of their positions done. Our guy did just that and because he had to disconnect the lines from the strips to identify them he taped them in their respective groups and left them hanging for the Install Leader to reconnect.
The word I got was that the labelling didn't make any sense and the map was incorrect so the whiole thing had to be done over but this time by the Install Team. I asked them to make sure the window was closed when they were done throwing money out of it....
The Install Team jammed the speakers together back onto terminal strips to get signal through them but they were definitely not all in the right spots.

As the old system was being dismantled and the new amps were being loaded into the existing racks, it was getting tighter by the day behind the racks. They had removed the old clusters around the clock and asked to remove the old wiring in the racks as well. I said yes to removing the wire going to the old speakers...
Oddly enough... the wiring running to the old clusters was exactly the same gauge as all of the existing patch from our old speakon patch panels around the arena levels. I happen to come into work one day to run signal through some monitors on the floor for the upcoming Remembrance Day event and couldn't seem to get sound.... when I went back to double check the patch I saw ALL of the wires chopped off 2 inches from the floor at the bottom of the amp rack. That's right... ALL of the lines had been cut....
To this day nobody knows who did it... It just happened..

At this point we were discussing various means of control. We were fairly committed to picking up a 24 channel Midas Venice and adding extra inputs and outputs through the DSP. With the winfall of extra money came, the idea was that we would be able to control the BSS DSP from touch screens in 2 seperate locations (booth and control office). The GUI was fairly slick including a diagram of the arena with the touch pads for all the specific zones so we could control the volume of that specific zone live without dialling back the amps or digging into the DSP. It also had delay presets for various applications including presentations from the 4 sides of the arena for smaller events, a delay for the anthem singer to reduce the time delay for hiom or her on the ice deck and as well a delay setting for setting up a small band on the concourse at a predetermined spot. Basically it was just going to move the zero point around the building and gain up or back speaker zones to reduce the chances of stray feed back.

As time went on the programming for the Crestron Screens got heavier and more essential but there were a few things not quite right... firstly we never did get the 15" monitor in the booth working properly, more specifically it won't allow the Crestron information to store and then one day it just shut off.... Side note: much later on I had a Crestron Technician from Moncton come in and look at the situation. The install from the Crestron Processor to the screen was done incorrectly by the Lead Installer and then the Consultant determined that the wrong processor was spec'ed which prevented us from storing the presets outside of the processor... if the processor failed or there was a power loss, all of the programming was lost.

As we got closer and closer to Opening game we had to come up with a plan to save preset levels for the zones... My only thought was a digital console for a quick fix.... I made the call the the Lead Installer who agreed 100% on the need for this and that he would get me an LS9 to demo. I got a file emailed to me with the latest anolog mixer shortly after
2 weeks went by with no console and no word from my Sloth... presuming he just forgot, I called him to follow up. It seems that not only had the take over of the Music Sto...re made it so the Install company couldn't obtain a demo console but they wouldn't even sell them one to sell to me! Instead of calling me to tell me this I finally chased him down and then he basically tells me that if I want to have that Fucking Console to buy it myself....
So I did...

[Malcolm Boyce]

That's right... ALL of the lines had been cut....
To this day nobody knows who did it... It just happened..

Oh no.... Somebody definitely knows.

[Mathieu Benoit]

I'll tell ya who did it for a if you sell me those JBL wedges... I'll give you a hint you asked him and he lied to your face. I know, I know... That doesn't really narrow it down in this line of fucktards does it?

I asked them to make sure the window was closed when they were done throwing money out of it....

Line of the week!

[warrbeat]

Come on Al... you should really stay off your Brother's profile....
The speakers bit was a clue but Fucktards?!

You're right about one thing... there was a lengthy line of possible subjects... if they all had Pinocchio noses they would look like a row of coat hooks (and not the row of Omniball ones in my office)

[Mathieu Benoit]

Come on Al... you should really stay off your Brother's profile....
The speakers bit was a clue but Fucktards?!

Actually fucktard is characteristic to all Benoit brothers and I want the speakers because Al already has some and I want to level the playing field in the rehearsal room.

[warrbeat]

Firstly I do appologize but you can understand the mistake I'm sure...

As far as the speakers go.... until I get new powered monitors or find someone who will offer me enough money for the 4 wedges to buy 2 powered speakers (the latter is definitely not a characteristic trait of the the Benoit Balls) I must decline either offer as not to shoot myself in the foot when asked to provide magic at the snap of a finger around this ole barn.

[Mathieu Benoit]

It is certainly not characteristic of Benoits to pay full price or anything near it for anything. But do keep me in mind when you are ready to off-load them.