Applications
Hotel and Resort Sound Systems
A hotel is dozens of rooms of audio pretending to be one system, and the ballroom has to earn its own revenue by Friday.
What this application asks of a system
The first thing that makes a hotel difficult is zone count. One property has a lobby, several restaurants and bars, a spa, a gym, a pool deck, corridors, meeting rooms, a ballroom that subdivides, and back of house. Each wants its own source, its own level and its own schedule, and the duty manager has to be able to change one without disturbing the others. The hard part is rarely the loudspeaker. It is the distribution scheme, the zone logic and an operating layer that survives staff turnover.
The second is that coverage has to be even at low level, which is the opposite of what peak output buys. If a guest area leans on a few loud sources, the tables underneath them get too much and the ones between them get nothing, so staff spend the evening raising the level to fix a gap that more level cannot fix. Uniform spacing at a modest tapping is what makes a lobby sound expensive.
The ballroom is a different business altogether. It is the property's highest-yielding room, sold as a conference hall on Tuesday, a gala dinner on Saturday and a wedding on Sunday. It subdivides on air walls that leak, it has a hard ceiling and banquet rounds that absorb at exactly head height, and the audience is seated wide rather than deep. The house system either holds that business or the client brings a production company in and the property earns the room rate only.
A resort adds the outdoors. Pool decks, terraces, beach bars and walkways have no boundaries to reinforce the low end, direct sun and rain on the hardware, chlorine or salt in the air, and a noise limit at the property line that is enforced by the guests in the rooms above. And a property of this size has to be able to address all of it intelligibly at once, which is a safety requirement as much as a service one, and it has to interleave with the music rather than replace it.
What we look at first
- Zone count, zone logic and the operating layer the duty manager actually touches
- Even coverage at low level across guest areas, which decides how the property sounds before it decides how loud it gets
- 70/100 V line distribution for long runs and dense speaker counts, low impedance where output matters
- The ballroom brief: air wall subdivision, banquet layouts, a conference floor and a gala in the same week
- Outdoor and wet areas: sun, rain, chlorine or salt, and the boundary noise limit
- Intelligible paging across the whole property, and the priority order between music, service pages and announcements
- Discreet mounting and finishes in rooms an interior designer specified before anyone mentioned loudspeakers
Why SSOUNDS for this
A property with forty zones does not want forty suppliers' firmware. We design and build the ceiling speakers, the ballroom arrays, the subwoofers, the amplifiers and the system processor, so the whole estate runs one platform, one preset library and one warranty path, and a zone that changes from a ceiling grid to a surface box does not change tonality as a guest walks between them.
We specify the ballroom as a revenue room rather than as an extension of the background music system. Holding a conference floor on Tuesday and a gala on Saturday is the brief that decides whether the property keeps the production budget or hands it to someone else, and it is the brief we design to.
Coverage is modelled before anything is quoted, so the answer to a guest floor is a speaker count and a tapping rather than a wattage. We operate from the UK, the United States and Nigeria, which means we specify for properties in very different climates and power conditions, and we will tell you which of those conditions applies to yours.
Recommended SSOUNDS products
Grouped by the job each product does in this kind of system. Specifications live on the product pages and in the data sheets, so nothing is restated here.
Ballroom and conference floor
The property's revenue room: a wide, shallow, hard space that has to read as a conference system with the air walls closed and as a gala system with them open.
SSOUNDS
SSOUNDS XTO 4.6
Column element of the XTO System, passive line array, 4 × 6.5″ drivers, 65 Hz – 20 kHz and 134 dB peak in a sightline-friendly column.
SSOUNDS
SSOUNDS LS208
Compact dual-8″ line-array element, 141 dB peak, 55 Hz reach and 100° coverage from a 26 kg box.
SSOUNDS
SSOUNDS M-12
12″ full-range point source, mains or floor wedge, the all-rounder of the M-series.
Background music and guest zones
Lobby, restaurants, bars, spa, corridors and back of house: even low-level coverage from many small outlets on a long distribution run.
SSOUNDS
SSOUNDS CL6
6.5″ two-way ceiling speaker, discreet, even distributed audio with 70/100 V tapping.
SSOUNDS
SSOUNDS CL8
8″ two-way ceiling speaker, full-range background and foreground audio with 70/100 V tapping.
SSOUNDS
SSOUNDS M-4
Ultra-compact 4″ full-range, discreet fill and foreground audio with M-rigging.
SSOUNDS
SSOUNDS M-6
Compact 6.5″ full-range, versatile install and portable speaker with M8 rigging.
SSOUNDS
SSOUNDS CL6P
6.5″ two-way pendant speaker for open ceilings, the CL6's drivers and 70/100 V tapping in a suspended housing.
SSOUNDS
SSOUNDS CL8SUB
8″ in-ceiling subwoofer in a back-can with spring-tab mounting, the low end under CL6 and CL8 ceiling zones.
Pool decks, terraces and outdoor zones
Open-air guest areas where there is no room to help the low end and the boundary limit is enforced by the guests upstairs.
SSOUNDS
SSOUNDS M-8
8″ full-range, high-output multipurpose box for portable PA, fill and install.
SSOUNDS
SSOUNDS M-10
10″ full-range, compact mains or monitor with strong vocal projection.
SSOUNDS
SSOUNDS M-12W
12″ two-way coaxial outdoor loudspeaker, IP56, 90° × 90°, 128 dB peak, with 70/100 V taps.
SSOUNDS
SSOUNDS M-8W
8″ two-way coaxial outdoor loudspeaker, IP56, 120° × 120°, 124 dB peak.
Subwoofers
Low-frequency support for the ballroom, the gym and a late bar, sized so it never becomes the floor above's problem.
Amplification, zoning and processing
The zone engine: per-zone level and source, alignment, after-hours limiting, paging priority, and presets staff cannot break.
SSOUNDS
SSOUNDS D14X
4-channel DSP amplifier with FIR, line-array power plus full system processing and presets.
SSOUNDS
SSOUNDS A14X
4-channel touring amplifier for line arrays, 4 × 2,000 W @ 4 Ω, analog input.
SSOUNDS
SSOUNDS DSP 4×8
4-in / 8-out loudspeaker processor, 96 kHz, 1/36-octave filters and full system alignment.
SSOUNDS
SSOUNDS A4-400
4-channel 1U Class-D installation amplifier, 4 × 400 W into 8 Ω, XLR and Euroblock inputs, speakON outputs.
LED video
Function room screens, lobby and wayfinding displays, and mobile panels for the events the property hosts itself.
AIXCEL
AIXCEL Poster Mobile LED Display
Slim mobile LED poster, wheel it in, plug it in, play. Retail, lobbies, events.
AIXCEL
AIXCEL FP Fine-Pitch Indoor LED Wall
P1.2 / P1.5 / P1.8 fine-pitch indoor LED, seamless 16:9 panels for boardrooms, studios and control rooms.
Unilumin
Unilumin Uslim III
Ultra-slim fixed-install LED. P0.9–P3.9 retail and storefront walls, 180° viewing.
Why these products. The CL8 names retail, hospitality and architectural install and the CL6 is described as the volume workhorse of commercial install, both with selectable 70/100 V or 8 Ohm operation and a conical pattern for even distributed coverage. The M-4 names retail and hospitality for discreet fill and foreground music, and the M-12SUB names hospitality and compact AV systems. The XTO 4.6 names premium corporate AV and auditoria and is only 200 mm wide, which is what makes it specifiable in a ballroom, and the LS208 names corporate AV and club installs. On the video side the AIXCEL Poster names hotel lobbies and retail windows, the AIXCEL FP names boardrooms and lobbies, and the Uslim III names retail and showrooms. The CL6P names hospitality, the M-12W and M-8W are IP56 coaxial outdoor loudspeakers that name terraces and pool decks, the LC8.3 names hotel function rooms, and the A4-400 is a 1U installation amplifier that names hotels. The CL8SUB is an 8 inch ceiling subwoofer that names hotels and resorts.
Guides for this application
Get this specced for your room
Send us the drawings, the seat count and what the room has to do. Our engineers model the coverage and come back with a product list, a rigging plan and a budget.