The Brook in New Hampshire is America’s largest charity casino, featuring the biggest sports book in New England, more than 500 casino gaming machines, a poker room, and an array of table games. The sprawling 75-acre property also boasts an outdoor deck, state-of-the-art showroom, banquet space, and a full-service restaurant.
Since acquiring the property in 2019, Nevada-based Eureka Casino Resort – the only 100% employee-owned hospitality company in the U.S. – has invested millions of dollars in renovations and enhancements to make The Brook a complete entertainment destination for anyone seeking live entertainment, fine dining, or Las Vegas-style casino gaming.
When it came to upgrading their A/V systems, the casino’s staff opted for Allen & Heath’s audio matrix processor, AHM, to provide scalable, quality sound distribution while keeping end-user controls friendly and simple.
“The AHM system was recommended to me by our A/V Integrator,” said the Director of Engineering for The Brook. “When I did my own independent research, I was extremely impressed. AHM also had a lot of fantastic reviews online. We needed a rock-solid audio distribution platform with a ton of flexibility, and AHM fit that bill in every way.”
The Brook, which is a quick 45-minute drive north of Boston near the New Hampshire border, was faced with some unique challenges for audio. With the facility’s previous DSP solution, intelligibility and overall sound levels were a noticeable issue. The Brook sought a solution that would provide clarity, intelligibility, consistency, and the scalability to meet their quickly growing processing needs.
The Brook features 16 separate zones (with several more being added in the near future), each being fed with different blends of three microphones, six cable TV receivers, two music players, and four computers. Because of the variety of events and styles of entertainment across the location, the casino needed the option to have certain inputs push out across all zones, while also allowing each zone to operate completely independently on source and level.
With an AHM-64, The Brook has plenty of room for current growth projections and any plans they may develop in the future. An AR2412 networked stagebox provides an expandable 24 mic/line inputs and 12 outputs for the system, in addition to the 12 local inputs and 12 outputs on the AHM itself. A Dante module was also added to the system for future-proofing and further expansion.
Five Allen & Heath IP-1 wall-plate controllers are sprinkled throughout the venue, giving simple one-knob control to management and staff for source selection, levels, and more. The facility’s management team plans on adding additional Allen & Heath IP controllers in the future to give the staff even more control over the distributed audio.
With the new system in place, the Brook team took a short lesson from the designers on how to use the system and was quickly off and running. They were thrilled with the experience of configuring the system, noting that AHM was incredibly intuitive and simple, not only to physically install and wire up, but to then configure the software to their specifications.
Since the system’s initial installation, The Brook has added two additional zones with at least 3 more to come in the future.
Thanks to AHM’s audio playback feature, The Brook now runs audio ads throughout the day. “The system lets us load in an audio file that will describe to our guests our upcoming promotions, concerts, and events,” explained a brook employee. “It triggers throughout the day every 90 minutes. The system is so configurable that it lets us select which zones the ads run in, have a different volume per zone based on that zones acoustic environment, trigger them at the set times, and then go right back to our normal programming. It is absolutely incredible what we can do with the AHM.”
Patrons noticed an immediate difference in intelligibility and consistency with the new system – level changes weren’t so extreme, TV audio was better controlled, and announcements were loud and clear throughout the facility.
The casino has received plenty of positive feedback from both employees and guests, resulting from the now consistent daily audio experience.
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