The mission of the Woodland Park Zoo is to save wild animals and their habitats. By
raising awareness among over 1 million yearly visitors, the Zoo educates and
empowers people to take action on behalf of the earth and its animal inhabitants.
The Banyan Wilds tiger exhibit is the most recent installation towards this effort.

There are approximately 3,000 tigers left in the wild today, which puts them at a
crossroads about whether or not the species will survive. Taking that theme
literally, the Zoo designed the tiger pen to be located at a crossroads in the middle
of the exhibit.

In order to realize the promise of this exhibit, the Zoo needed an easy-to-use
speaker solution that accommodated the shallow and wide dimensions, and
supported a level of intimacy that enabled visitors to hear everything the tigers
were doing, and that the zookeepers were saying.

The team hired to create this solution comprised AV design consultancy AEI, and
integrator AVI-SPL. “We’ve worked with both AEI and AVI-SPL for about a decade
and they’re really good at understanding our quirky needs,’ said Jay Wallace, IT
Systems Administrator for the Zoo. “We’re a strange hybrid of a theme park and a
naturalistic experience, and they both get that.’

Knowing that a successful speaker solution would allow zookeepers to address
visitors at a comfortable, conversational level, while keeping the sound contained
within the area, Thom Mullins, Senior Consultant with AEI, chose the Tannoy QFlex
16 speakers.

As a line array, the QFlex 16 enabled the Zoo to focus the audio dispersion to cover
the exact area they needed it to, while not spilling over into adjacent exhibits.

Getting visitors as close as possible to the tigers in a naturalistic habitat was
important to the Zoo. “Rather than create a cage or put the animals behind an
artificial barrier, they chose a layered plexiglas,’ said Mullins. “Getting rid of the
visual barriers made it possible for visitors to really feel like they’re right there
with the tigers. We were able to mount the QFlex in a way that blended with the
naturalistic environment, not took away from it.’

In addition to the speaker solution, interactive experiences were distributed
throughout the exhibit to further tell the story of the tigers’ struggle to survive in
the wild. By installing the Tannoy QFlex 16 speakers and creating a system that
blends naturalistic experience with high-quality audio, the Zoo will be able to
communicate the plight of the tigers clearly and efficiently to millions of visitors
every year.

“The Tannoy QFlex 16 is a very natural sounding system and it’s very easy to work
with.’ Thom Mullins, Senior Consultant, AEI.