HARMAN’s BSS Audio, Crown and JBL Professional Provide Acoustic Atmospherics at The Island In Pigeon Forge Entertainment and Retail Center

PIGEON FORGE, Tennessee – The Island at Pigeon Forge is a brand-new entertainment and retail center located in Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains. It’s on an actual island in the Little Pigeon River and offers a wide variety of rides, shopping, restaurants and attractions, with a 132-room hotel to be completed in spring 2014. Providing the audio solution was sound contractor Clair Brothers Audio who installed a system featuring HARMAN’s JBL Professional loudspeakers and Crown amplifiers, all tied together via BSS Audio signal processing components.

Clair Brothers installed the distributed audio system at The Island at Pigeon Forge, which encompasses more than 22 acres. Dustin Goen, Clair Brothers system designer and project manager specified 128 JBL Control 28T-60 loudspeakers for use throughout the facility, indoors and outdoors in the buildings and mounted on light poles. The loudspeakers are powered by a total of 12 Crown CTs Series CTs 2000-LITE, CTs 1000-LITE and CTS 600-LITE amplifiers. Signal processing and distribution is provided by three BSS Audio BLU-800 processors, a BLU-320 I/O expander, a BLU-100 12 x 8 signal processor and three BLU-8v2 wall controllers. The amplifiers are connected to the BSS Audio components via CobraNet, using PIP Programmable Input Processor modules that are installed in the amps.

 The Crown amplifiers and BSS Audio components are housed in four distributed audio equipment rooms, all tied together with fiber cable. The tech staff can monitor and control all the amplifiers using a customized page in the HARMAN HiQnet London Architect™ system control and configuration software. Each of the equipment rooms has remote inputs and paging, enabling staffers to distribute inputs across the park or page specific areas.

“Although it covers a large area, we were able to test the entire system in the shop before we brought it to the site and configure and tune everything onsite in two days,” said Goen. “We chose the JBL Control 28T-60 loudspeakers with WeatherMax grilles because of their combination of sound quality, power handling and durability, which is obviously of prime importance in an outdoor installation where they’re also going to be used day in and day out.”

Goen continued, “The BSS Audio BLU devices are my go-to digital signal and networking processors because they offer tremendous flexibility and total reliability. These qualities, along with their ability to connect all the amplifiers on the same network using a single software package made them the obvious choice.”

“We have been pleased with the results from Dustin and his team’s hard work on this project. Everything has been working well thus far, and sound quality we now have throughout the property is excellent,” added Beau Berni, Director of Operations, Pigeon Forge Entertainment and Retail Center.

HARMAN designs, manufactures, and markets a wide range of infotainment and audio solutions for the automotive, consumer, and professional markets. It is a recognized world leader across its customer segments with premium brands including AKG®, Harman Kardon®, Infinity®, JBL®, Lexicon®, and Mark Levinson® and leading-edge connectivity, safety and audio technologies. The Company is admired by audiophiles across multiple generations and supports leading professional entertainers and the venues where they perform. More than 25 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with HARMAN audio and infotainment systems. HARMAN has a workforce of 14,800 people across the Americas, Europe, and Asia and reported sales of $4.7 billion for the last twelve months ended December 31, 2013.