Some five years back this was a showcase microbrewery for Fosters with the stainless steel devices being the centre piece of the hotel. That is now all gone and drinkers are left with an impressive 70 metre island bar in a room cleverly panelled in wood.
The Middle Park Hotel has been designed around the ideas of old “Travellers Hotels”. A place where you have a small self-contained suite upstairs and the environment on the ground floor can offer spaces for different moods and situations. A guests lounge off the reception is a place to meet up with friends or do some quiet work before a meeting.
The bar and dining room references the institutions that were built with the excitement of travel in mind. For the regular visitor, the Hotel will become the home away from home.
“In some ways I was trying to see how a modern sport bar could mix with my client’s memorabelia collection and his desire to reinvent the MCG long room, the Melbourne travellors Club and the MCC bull ring bar,” explained Mark Healy, director of Six Degrees. “Spacially it is driven by the Six Degrees approach to inclusive hospitality environments with abstracted elements of historical sporting/club/hunting/establishment layered over it.”
Quest MS601The 601 is the ideal general purpose voice/music reproduction speaker with an ideal balance between bass and high frequency equalization. Its high output is impressive for its compact size and power handling is a conservative 75 watts RMS with high efficiency, 150w peak handling.
Richard Hallam of YSI Professional System Design and Integration conceived, designed and commissioned the audio system for the Middle Park Hotel.
The audio is split over the following zones:
- Main Bar
- Dining
- Hotel Lobby, Corridors/Toilets
- Outdoor locations, Courtyard & Armstrong Street.
These zones are controlled via a Cloud zoner that, according to Richard, works a treat and has good open sound.
I”n the Main Bar we needed to give good sonic delivery and coverage as the playback medium would be sports orientated and therefore clarity of speech and coverage was paramount,” remarked Richard. “Small Quest 2 way wall mounted loudspeakers
were chosen for the job due to their suitability. Set top boxes provide the sports sound and vision.”
Two 31 bands of EQ were installed to help achieve the sonic quality needed.
The same Quest, very compact, wall mounted loudspeakers (twenty-nine in total) were utilised throughout all zones with exception of the Toilets that were Australian Monitor ceiling loudspeakers.
All of these zones have background music playback options so that diners and others are provided with the appropriate music rather than TV sound.
There are a number of TV’s around the Main Bar, the selected TV channel’s audio can be routed anywhere in the Hotel.
Amplifiers used were manufactured by Australian Monitor and QSC.
The finished system sounds great, is aesthetically pleasing and was achieved very cost effectively.
The installation of all the TV’s, cabling and mounting of the hardware was carried out by Joe Vivona and Phil from the Commercial division of Jim’s Antennas.