COLLEYVILLE, TEXAS – APRIL 2009: The newly-opened Piazza in the Village, located near Dallas, was designed from the ground up to be the ideal venue for upscale weddings. Situated in the quaint town square of Colleyville, Texas, the 20,000 square-foot facility features a traditional 250-seat wedding chapel, a spacious reception area with wet bar, an ornate courtyard, and lavishly-appointed groom and bridal suites. Although its technically-sophisticated audio and video systems are kept tastefully out of sight, the lucky couples who wed at Piazza in the Village are treated to distinctively twenty-first century amenities, not limited to audio distribution of the ceremony through wedding webcasts for guests who can’t attend. SymNet open-architecture DSP solutions provide the audio backbone for the state-of-the-art system, and SymNet ARC wall panels provide the elegant user-interface that makes it appear simple.
Piazza in the Village was born of its owner’s search for a suitable venue for his daughter’s future wedding. He was surprised to find that in Dallas, a city whose very motto is “Live Large – Think Big,” there were no venues dedicated to hosting every aspect of an upscale wedding. An astute businessman, he recognized an opportunity. Two years later, his daughter’s ceremony was held at the new facility, and a ten-person crew from WE TV’s long-running program “Platinum Weddings” was on hand to document the event.
The challenge that faced 7K Solutions integrator Paul Dexter was not an uncommon one. On an astonishingly tight budget, the owner asked him to provide a fully-networked, fully-customized audio system with sophisticated functionality that would still appear simple to the facility’s staff and clients. He used a SymNet 8×8 DSP at the core of his system, with a SymNet BreakIn12 and a SymNet BreakOut12 to provide additional inputs and outputs. For the users, he positioned eight SymNet ARC-SWK wall panels at strategic locations throughout the facility.
“For all the functionality that it is capable of, and for fidelity that rivals systems at any price, SymNet is the most cost-effective solution on the market,” said Dexter. “I love the fact that for all the power I have to customize the system, the well-thought-out interface makes it so easy for the user to control. I print out my own labels, place them on the ARC wall panels, and the whole thing looks so simple to the end user.”
For the chapel, Dexter used EAW KF-series loudspeakers and SB-series subwoofers. The SymNet 8×8 DSP handled all of the loudspeaker management, including EQ, compression, limiting, crossovers and filtering. For the bell tower, real bells proved prohibitively expensive, so Dexter created a wedding bell CD combined with Bogen horn-type loudspeakers to produce a convincing illusion. An example of the sort of sophistication that the SymNet system facilitated, Dexter was able to dedicate a CD player to the bells. Whereas the user has volume control over most other input sources, he deliberately kept the bell tower processing and volume control out of the user’s hands. That prevents user error from compromising the system. “Like so many aspects of this system, it’s totally foolproof,” he summarized.
Dexter relied on many of SymNet’s stock modules to deliver similar foolproof performance in the reception area. For toasts and speeches, a wireless handheld mic feeds directly into the SymNet system. Auto-leveling and feedback cancellation ensure that both a booming, proud father and a muted, thoughtful grandmother are able to convey their heartfelt words with equal intelligibility and grace. A Kramer audio/video switcher ties together the three large video screens in the reception area that permit display of DVDs or a roving, handheld camera. For mid-week business meetings, the reception area divides into two rooms, and the SymNet DSP handles room combining with ease.
Users control the system from SymNet ARC-SWK wall panels. Each panel has four buttons and a knob. Dexter programmed them to select input sources and control volume. The bottom button always selects “house music,” which emanates from an iPod dock in the control room. Additional input sources include the goings-on in the chapel, audio for the satellite video panel, and local iPod docks in the groom and bridal suites. In a nutshell, any relevant audio can find its way to any relevant speaker, including those in the restrooms, the hallways and the courtyard. These public spaces are all fitted with Tannoy Dual Concentric recessed or surface mount speakers.
Using robotic cameras in the chapel, Piazza in the Village also offers on-the-spot DVD production and real-time webcasts of the ceremony. To support the audio of these futuristic features, Dexter intelligently combined audio sources with fully-automated mixing and speaker management, all within the SymNet 8×8 DSP. The future of weddings is here!
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