The Westfield Valencia Town Center in Santa Clarita is a classic California indoor/ outdoor retail environment, with a multistory mall plus sidewalks of shops united by common design themes—and audio. Distributed audio creates a subtle unifying atmosphere throughout the center, while in some dining and nightlife areas it contributes even more actively to the guest experience.
When AMT Systems, Santa Clarita, Calif. set out to retrofit the system with DSP and control features, they started with a more traditional—and costly—design. While the customer liked all the features, they needed something significantly less expensive, says Tim Carlson, president of AMT Systems. The key to that was the Yamaha MTX line of processors. Carlson says the processors provided the kind of scheduling and calendar-driven control the client wanted in order to individually adapt the center’s zones (and power usage) to opening hours, days of the week, and seasonal events. The team utilized mostly MTX5-Ds with some MTX3s (as well as all new Yamaha speakers and amplifiers). “We were able to put the processor on WiFi so they could use an iPad to manage the system and zones.”
In the process they were also able to solve a confounding problem with the old wiring. “Many speaker cables ran through tenant spaces and would often get cut during renovations, which would short the whole amplifier and take out two or four zones. With the Yamaha XMV amplifiers we installed, if a wire got cut during retro it would only take out that one zone.”
“The MTX DSP made the project,” Carlson sums up. “It was a lot less expensive in the programming. They got 95% of what they would have gotten with the more expensive design. This was our first use of these processors and we’ve since used them on other projects because of the success we had.”
