South Point Hotel, Casino and Spa, located south of McCarran Airport on the Las Vegas Strip, recently completed its new bowling facility specifically designed for professional bowling tournaments and competitions. The new facility is part of a larger project that also includes two new equestrian arenas located below the bowling center that serve as overflow for their existing main Arena and Equestrian Center and direct access to 1,200 air-conditioned horse stalls.
South Point chose Q-Sys, QSC amplifiers and loudspeakers for its new addition based on their previous experience with QSC products and the ability to integrate all the audio systems across the entire property.
“This is a fairly large facility and we have a lot of different kinds of events that come through throughout the year,” says Jason Lein, South Point’s production manager. “We needed something with a flexible backbone that would allow us to quickly and easily change room combinations, configure paging and program source material and automatically adjust volume levels as ambient noise level in the venue changes. Q-Sys and the associated peripherals met all those needs.”
When the resort opened in 2006, South Point selected QSC WideLine and Basis for their main show room. Based on their experience with QSC, when the resort built its Arena and Equestrian Center, the A/V production team chose a Q-Sys Core 500i network processor, CX Series amplifiers and AcousticDesign In-ceiling loudspeakers to handle paging and P.A. for the new facility.
“We started out just with a QSC WideLine 10 system in the showroom with a Basis 914lz processing on the front end and since then we have upgraded all our back end gear to Q-Sys as well,” explains Lein.
Completely designed and installed by Lein and the staff at South Point, the new bowling center and arena expansion system includes a Q-Sys Core 500i with half-a-dozen Q-Sys I/O Frames and over 20 QSC CXD-Q power amplifiers that drive a variety of QSC AcousticPerformance and QSC AcousticDesign loudspeakers. The use of CXD-Q Amplifiers, designed specifically for use with the Q-Sys platform and utilizing RJ45 interconnects, enabled a quick and trouble-free connection of CXD-Q on the venue’s Q-LAN network.
With about 120 days of planned operation in 2015, 210 days in 2016 and nearly 320 days of planned operation in 2017 to support the events such as the Teen Masters, the PBA World Series of Bowling, USBC Women’s Championships and USBC Open Championships among the dozens of other PBA regional events and tournaments, South Point knew that having a “turnkey” system that offered advance routing options and could be configured on the fly was paramount.
Like its previous Q-Sys install, Lein cited the ability to create custom user control interfaces (UCIs) that can be deployed on wireless devices as a major benefit.
“Whatever the event is our production staff can quickly setup an appropriate audio configuration tailored for the event’s needs and make adjustments from anywhere within the venue,” says Lein. “This saves us a tremendous amount of time and hassle.”
Lein cites QSC’s complete architectural audio product line and the highly flexible Q-Sys network audio platform with its Layer-3 network configuration as a key considerations for selecting the QSC as the complete audio solution.
“Q-Sys is hands down the best, most flexible faculty processor in the market today. Combine that with the CXD-Q amplifiers that seamlessly integrate onto the Q-LAN network, tuning and presets and that also feature presets and tunings specifically for QSC loudspeakers and then add QSC loudspeakers on top of that and you get a system with unmatched flexibility, power, fidelity and reliability.
“When we opened South Point, we started out with QSC just in the main showroom. Today we have deployed QSC products throughout the entire property. From our Casino to the Main Arena, our lounges to this new expansion facility, we can route audio from any source, anywhere throughout the property. Q-Sys and QSC products as a whole have proven themselves to be a very flexible, highly reliable solutions for our property. It doesn’t get any easier or better than this,” concludes Lein.
For more information, visit www.qsc.com and www.southpointcasino.com.
