Bosch at Melbourne Departures Store

F1RST Tax & Duty Free has opened its new Departures store at Melbourne International Airport. After successfully completing the Sydney Duty Free store, Saltec, the Sydney-based audio, visual, and electric company, was employed to provide an audio system; the finished product makes use of many Bosch products.

A key feature of the store is the five "hotspots," which are key advertising and promotional areas for products being targeted for extra marketing. As well as screens running off a media player, each hotspot has its own set of speakers providing specific audio just for that area.

In all there are 26 Electro-Voice EVID 4.2T surface-mount speakers and 135 Bosch LBC3099 ceiling speakers utilized in the store. Hotspot 1 has four EVID 4.2T, Hotspots 2, 3, and 4 have two EVID 4.2T and three LBC3099 each while Hotspot 5 has two EVID 4.2T and four LBC3099. The liquor bulkhead has ten EVID 4.2T and the MAC retail area has five LBC3099 speakers.

The remaining Bosch LBC3099 ceiling speakers are used as zone speakers throughout the store, split over three background music zones.

Saltec opted to use Bosch and Electro-Voice speakers because of their cost effectiveness and total reliability.

"The performance of the Bosch speakers for this application is ideal as they are more directional than other speakers providing less overflow," commented Chris Azzopardi, Saltec's project system engineer. "In particular, the Electro-Voice EVIDs are a nice size to compliment the screens in the Hotspots."

Each Hotspot has an Electro-Voice remote PWS-4 programmable wall switch and volume control managed by two Electro-Voice NetMax N8000 networkable digital signal processors with multiple input and output cards.

"Bryan Davidson was very helpful in assisting us with the design and installation," said Chris. "We have 20 input sources to 12 output sources allowing for further expansion in the future if required. The NetMax is a good solid and reliable unit which means we're not out there every couple of weeks trying to change over amps or input cards."

Completing the family of Bosch products are four Dynacord PCL1225T two-channel power amplifiers and Electro-Voice CPS4.5 four-channel amplifiers with Remote Control Modules RCM810.