Vancouver Convention Centre

Audio Systems

The Vancouver Convention Centre (VCC) is British Columbia’s premier event centre. Located on the waterfront in Vancouver’s downtown core, it hosts over 500 events and hundreds of thousands of guests each year. The facility is owned and operated by the B.C. Pavilion Corporation (PavCo).

The VCC boasts over 70 meeting rooms and 466,500 square feet of event space across its East and West buildings. Its event operations — and the economic benefits they bring to the city and province — are contingent on the reliability of its distributed audio system.

The VCC’s audio systems were installed in 2009 when the newer West building was constructed. In recent years, those systems became fragile, leaving the Centre vulnerable to outages. Technicians described the entire facility’s audio shutting off if there was an issue in one part of the building. Techs would have to sprint across the facility to perform a hard reboot.

With the advancing expectations of modern event technology, a new vision was needed for the VCC’s audio control and room combining capabilities.

It was challenging to grasp the project’s full scope due to incremental upgrades over the years. We pored over old drawings and interviewed users, contractors, and technicians to understand the state of the entire system so we could coordinate a complete upgrade.

Further, the convention centre has many stakeholders, including contract network providers, AV event vendors, and its in-house IT and facilities staff. Before the design could begin, the boundaries of scope between each of these players had to be defined.

Lastly, the owner wanted a system the IT department could understand and control. They did not want to rely on contractors to manage the system.

A new, custom-built audio network now connects the entire facility. This durable and resilient system has multiple redundancies built-in through equipment and design choices, such as:

• Uninterruptible power supplies

• Audio processors programmed to re-route signal instantly if equipment fails

• An advanced audio network transport protocol that is no longer vulnerable to whole-system outages.

A custom control system provides basic control to users via touch panels in each room. In addition, technicians can access advanced controls through a custom web interface, such as room combining and audio fine-tuning capabilities.

To reduce the impact on the client, we designed a system that could be installed alongside the existing one and cut over in a single day. The VCC’s busy schedule and the criticality of its audio capabilities made this a key requirement.

To accomplish this, we ensured the system would fit in existing racks, had it installed alongside the old equipment, and successfully transitioned to the new audio infrastructure within the allotted time.

The new system includes over 70 devices, 300 output channels, more than 300 input channels, and a distributed paging system.

If you’d like to learn more about how audiovisual planning, design, and implementation can help achieve your goals for your commercial project, contact Chroma today.

Location

Vancouver Convention Centre

Project Team

BC Pavilion Corporation

Completion Date

2022