Our partners at SoundHouse have just finished rebuilding the sound system of Most City Center, a large shopping mall in Dnipro, Ukraine. They installed the original system there twenty years ago. The building is the same and so are the equipment racks, but almost everything inside them has changed, and so has life in Ukraine.
Two cabinets then, eight rack units now
Twenty years ago the 16-zone system filled two large cabinets with amplifiers, controllers and relays. SoundHouse replaced all of it. The new system fits into eight rack units: Dynacord IX amplifiers, a compact PC and a network switch, driving 16 zones with 12 kW of amplifier power.
One player for all 16 zones
Multi Room Audio Player (now Multi Zone Audio Player, MZAP 7) handles every one of the 16 zones. It plays background music across the mall, greets visitors and sends announcements to the zones that need them. It also plays the emergency messages.
The system runs on its own. It starts in the morning, shuts down in the evening and follows the mall’s daily routine without anyone having to press a button.
Built for wartime
Some of this work the engineers would rather not have had to do. Led by CTO Oleksiy Konichenko, the SoundHouse team wrote new scenarios for today’s reality: fire, red and yellow air-raid alerts, mine threats, running on generator power, drills and the all-clear. The system detects the alert level and region by itself and then runs the right sound scenario, with its own announcements and its own playlist.
The automation logic runs in Dynacord’s SONICUE TaskEngine, and it works together with Multi Room Audio Player through the player’s API. So when an alert comes in, the music and the emergency messages in every zone are handled by one system.
All control, monitoring and reconfiguration happens online. SoundHouse builds the control screens to suit each client’s needs. For this mall that means a main page with the music source and per-zone volume levels, the emergency message panel, and a status view.
Thank you
“On one hand, I’m proud of the level at which all of this is built. On the other, it is sad that our engineers had to develop these new algorithms at all. But we stay optimists.”
— Andrey Garkavy, CEO of SoundHouse
We are proud that our software is part of this project. Thank you to Andrey Garkavy, Oleksiy Konichenko and the whole SoundHouse team for the project and for letting us share it. If you are planning a similar installation in Ukraine, you can reach SoundHouse directly.