Soundweb™ London Provides Great Audio Control For The Newly Renovated Stowe Mountain Resort At Spruce Peak

Base Lodge and Spa facilities can share audio thanks to the BLU-80’s CobraNet™ functionality

When Vermont’s legendary Stowe Mountain Resort at Spruce Peak opens its renovated facilities in time for the next ski season, skiers will benefit from many enhancements, including new high-speed quad lifts, vastly improved snowmaking and grooming capabilities, and restructuring of trails. They will also have great-sounding music throughout the base Lodge and Spa, thanks to the unique abilities of BSS Audio™ Soundweb™ London, which constitutes the foundation of all the audio at the Resort. The design and installation of the sound systems is being done by Geer Sound & Communications, of Milton, Vermont.

The Stowe Mountain Resort is in the process of a $300 million makeover, the centerpiece of which is the Stow Mountain Lodge, a new ski-in, ski-out luxury hotel and spa that will rival those at the finest ski resorts worldwide. Built in the new “Vermont-Alpine” style, the Lodge will offer a truly luxurious setting with 139 guestrooms, stone-framed fireplaces, oversized relaxation tubs, marble bathroom floors, granite countertops and flat screen displays. The audio system at both the Lodge and Spa will complement the lavish construction, architectural design and fastidious attention to detail. “The Soundweb London system gave us the tremendous flexibility of configuration we needed for this project,” explains David Geer, Jr., President of Geer Sound & Communications. Working in two phases to bring the Lodge and the Spa online, Geer used 16 BLU-10 programmable touch-screen controllers and six BLU-80 signal processors to create 25 audio zones in the Lodge, which allows the system to be tailored to match any configuration of meeting spaces via its movable walls, as well as another five fixed-space meeting rooms. “The architecture of the BLU-80 allowed us to do that easily,” says Geer. “Also, the BLU-80 has CobraNet capability right out of the box. Since the Spa rack and Lodge rack are separated by more than 100 meters, past the range of Ethernet, CobraNet over multimode fiber was the only solution, and the BLU-80 was ready for it.”

The Spa can send five individual channels of music to each room, allowing users to make their own selections from the Spa’s server, or plug in their own personal music device into a wall dock. Twenty-five BLU-8 programmable zone controllers and a BLU-10 provide a high degree of flexibility in routing and controlling audio. The BLU-8 controllers are paired with an Intelix wall balun inside a custom plate fabricated by RCI Custom, which allows the input from an iPod or MP3 player to run down CAT5 cabling back to the rack. “That really simplified the wiring we had to do, and the BLU-8 is a very cost-effective control solution when you have this many individual rooms,” says Geer. “For everything we needed on this project, the Soundweb London system had a solution.”