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Caesars Atlantic City Fountain Show Flows with Help from Meyer Sound M2D
One of Atlantic City, N.J.’s most impressive shows is only five minutes long and features no actors, acrobats, or musicians. From Caesars Atlantic City Hotel and Casino, The Pier at Caesars is a shopping mall in an enclosed glass “sky bridge” traveling from the famed boardwalk, down the length of the city’s historic pier, to a four-story atrium at the end. Ringed with high-end stores and showrooms, the atrium’s center is occupied by exotic fountains that “perform” a show, called, simply, The Show.
The free, five-minute spectacular — the world’s largest indoor fountain presentation within a retail environment — is a complex production combining marine and lighting systems with a sophisticated audio system built around Meyer Sound's Matrix3™ audio show control system and self-powered loudspeakers.
The Show was developed by Burbank, Calif.-based Thinkwell Design and Production, the creative technology firm behind a long list of attractions and exhibits for parks, museums, resorts and other public facilities. “Our goal was to produce a design for this show that would relate directly to its environment,” says Thinkwell’s chief creative officer, Craig Hanna, who notes that the company spent four years designing the fountains.
The show’s stellar audio system is the creation of Thinkwell Associate Sound Designer Vikram Kirby and international award-winning sound designer and Thinkwell CFO/Executive Producer Francois Bergeron, whose credits include Cirque du Soleil’s Varekai, Saltimbanco, and Quidam tours, and long-running shows La Nouba in Orlando and O at Las Vegas’s Bellagio.
Bergeron and Kirby made use of Meyer Sound’s MAPP Online Pro acoustical prediction software in planning the system’s coverage patterns. “We did extensive MAPP modeling for the system,” Kirby remarks, “and the modeling came out quite close to the actual response in the space. Over the past year we at Thinkwell have done quite a bit with MAPP, and have found it an excellent tool to integrate into our design process.”
Bergeron and Kirby’s design featured a center cluster of 11 M2D compact curvilinear array loudspeakers and six PSW-2 high-power flyable subwoofers, all weather protected and hung inside a “rain curtain.” The system is monitored by Meyer Sound’s RMS™ remote monitoring system. “Having the ability to verify the operational status of the whole system at a glance is a great insurance policy for us,” says Kirby. “The show we designed and programmed is the show people will be hearing, every time.”
The daytime show features a History of Dance tribute, while the night-time show, designed as a more exotic, sultry, adult-oriented presentation, features a jazz rendition of Eddie Cooley and John Davenport’s classic 1956 song “Fever,” and adds the visual impact of a sophisticated LED matrix that can create any color combination. “At night, we have the added bonus of lighting,” Hanna observes, “whereas during the day, we're fighting sunlight.”
Kirby explains that the Meyer Sound array was well suited to the challenge of making the presentation effective in the spacious atrium. “The greatest difficulty in designing the system was the room acoustics,” he says, “combined with the fact that the audience is on all sides of the pool, like an arena. Because of this, we had to manage the coverage of each individual speaker as much as possible; any excessive reflections would really impair the coherence of the system as a whole. The M2Ds worked out great because they have such a controlled vertical coverage pattern. Although we have eleven of them, we’re not actually using the speakers in a traditional line array configuration. Their independent coverage angles simply match the needs of this unique design.”
Programming for the show’s playback material was created using Apple Logic Pro, and playback is streamed via a 16-channel RME Fireface 800 interface to the Matrix3.
Though the show is short, programming was intense, but Kirby and Bergeron accomplished it all because they were able to keep their energies focused on putting together the show, rather than on the sound system. “The Meyer Sound system worked exactly as we hoped it would, which allowed us to spend more of our time in the field mixing and designing the show than tuning and tweaking the sound system,” Kirby says. “With almost 200 source tracks and hundreds of Matrix3 cues in just a few minutes of show, it's a good thing, too!”
Kirby is quick to point out, however, that the real benefit of the system is in the results they obtained. “After the project was over, I was asked by someone who hadn't seen the show whether it was worth using such high quality speakers in a room as acoustically challenging as The Pier at Caesars,” he recalls. “I pulled out the measured in-room response curve of the center cluster and the question was quickly dropped. The proof is in the sound.”
The liquid portion of The Show features choreographed fountains of water which dance up and down to the beat of instrumental music of various eras and styles, the world’s first articulated rain curtain (capable of generating 3D images), and a 19,000-gallon reflection pool with a computerized matrix of more than 150 independently controlled fountain nozzles.
Between shows, the fountains use sensors to “play” three “games” in response to the actions of onlookers. Illuminated by advanced, intelligent LED lighting technology, visitors are immersed in a 360-degree aural experience enjoyable from all three levels of the shopping complex.
7th February 2007
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