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UNLV’s Student Union Gets Community I/O Series
When the student body at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas first voted to add a fee to help fund construction of the original Moyer Student Union building back in the early 1960s, UNLV had just 5,000 students, and Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack were still performing regularly down on the Strip. Forty years later the city of Las Vegas has grown beyond anyone’s expectations and the current UNLV 28,000-member student population has more than outgrown the Student Union. Clearly time for an upgrade.
The new Moyer Student Union is being built in two stages, the first of which opened this fall. The new 135,000 square foot space is bigger and better, offering a dining court, a TV lounge, office space for student advocacy and interest groups, more and expanded spaces for studying and socializing, a 300-seat movie theatre, and a powerful sound system utilising several models of Community Professional loudspeakers.
The main areas and food court are served by a music and paging system based around Community’s I/O5, a compact 5-inch two-way indoor/outdoor system offering a 90 x 50 degree dispersion pattern that was ideally suited for the task.
“The original specification for the job had called for in-ceiling speakers,” recalls Robert Sims of Las Vegas-based Communication Electronic Systems, the firm that handled system design and installation for the job. “But when we got to the site and discovered that most of the ceiling was a metal grid, I knew we’d have to rethink the speakers, since any type of in-ceiling speakers would have created far too much vibration and interfered with the building’s aesthetics. I remembered how impressed we were with the I/O5 demo we’d heard, and it fitted the project budget nicely, so I suggested them as an alternative, and the folks at UNLV readily agreed.”
Based on the I/O series’ extra-wide coverage pattern, Sims and the CES crew opted to place the speakers on the sidewalls above the grid of the long and relatively narrow space to further avoid excessive vibration. “I expected the speakers to sound good, but I was rather surprised at how broad the coverage is,” Sims added. “We’ve got the speakers moderately spaced throughout the corridors, with only one speaker every six to ten feet on alternating sides, but the sound is clean and consistent, with no drop outs or hot spots. We’ve got a considerable amount of processing and zoning capability in the system, but the speakers sound really impressive, even with everything running flat and unprocessed.”
CES also installed a complete A/V system in the Student Union’s movie theater, with HD projection on a 20 x 11 foot screen and audio comprising of Community Professional’s SLS960 and SBS25 full-range horn-loaded loudspeaker systems. “We time-aligned the subs to the main speakers and EQed a bit to help compensate for the somewhat flat contour of the room, and that was it in terms of installation,” Sims remarks. “It was absolutely painless.”
“We installed the entire low-voltage package for the building – audio and video, access control, fire alarm systems, wireless, telephone and data infrastructure,” Sims adds. The system also includes Crestron control in the theatre and conference rooms, and BSS London DSP with custom wireless controls throughout the building.
Phase two of the new Moyer Student Union is slated to open next fall, along with demolition of the old Student Union.
20th October 2006
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