Lakeland Square Mall was built in 1988 to serve Lakeland, Florida, which is situated
midway between Tampa and Orlando and is thus a suburban community of both
metropolitan areas. As its original sound system aged and fell into disrepair, the
mall owners called on MABE Production and Installation company – also of Lakeland,
Florida – to revitalize it. Confronted with the need for multiple zones with plenty of
power for long 70V runs and limited rack space, MABE specified an Ashly Pema
8250.70 integrated Protea™ matrix 8×8 digital processor and eight-channel
amplifier, which delivers 250W per channel in just two rack spaces.
“Lakeland Square Mall’s original sound system held its own for quite a long time,
but in recent years, a steady attrition of loudspeaker failures started causing a lot
of annoying volume differences,’ said Richard Vaughan, project engineer and design
engineer with MABE. “Some parts of the mall have high ceilings and some parts
have low ceilings, and the volume differences between them weren’t perfect to
begin with and were getting worse. Apart from all that, the mall is crowded on the
weekends and in the evenings, but far less crowded during the weekdays. The mall
staff was having control issues – the system would either be too loud on weekdays
or two quiet on the weekends. There was no happy medium. They were trying to
handle it manually, but that was often frustrating.’
As before the renovation, inputs to the system include simple playback devices and
services along with an override paging mic. The MABE installation crew went
through the mall and replaced all the inoperable or close-to-inoperable
loudspeakers and rezoned the system into eight logical units. They re-tapped
loudspeakers, where necessary, for more even coverage between the low and the
high ceilings. Critically, they used the Ashly Pema 8250.70’s real-time clock and
event scheduler features so that the system automatically turns up and down to
match the traffic and mood of different days and times. The paging system is also
cleaned up, with a smooth duck and zone selection for pages that do not have to go
out across the entire mall.
“The Ashly Pema is a unique box, and it really fit this application perfectly,’ said
Vaughan. “Everything we need for the system is in two rack spaces so we could
squeeze it in where they had a bit of room. The power-to-weight ratio is
remarkable – eight channels at 250W per channel, and a fully functional matrix
processor allowed us to do all of the special conditioning and scheduling they
required. The Pema even has mic inputs, which allowed us to plug the paging mic
directly into the unit! Ashly’s reliability is fantastic, which is especially important
given the recent frustrations they’ve had.’
The mall opted to forgo any purpose-built user control and currently overrides
scheduled volumes by turning knobs on the front of the Ashly Pema 8250.70.
