2008 NSW NECA Awards

Rutledge Engineering have secured the New South Wales Commercial Medium Project 2008 NECA Award

NECA 2008 State Winner (NECA 2008 State Winner)

Rutledge Engineering are proud to annouce their success in winning the New South Wales NECA (National Electrical & Communications Association) award for Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority

New South Wales

Commercial – Medium Project

Darling Harbour sound system

Darling Harbour, located on the western edge of the Sydney CBD, is a world leading waterfront leisure and entertainment destination. With its spectacular harbour setting, the precinct is a popular place for Sydneysiders and visitors to spend their time relaxing and celebrating. A wealth of Sydney’s favourite attractions resides in Darling Harbour including the Chinese Garden of Friendship, Sydney Aquarium and LG IMAX theatre. Cockle Bay Wharf, King Street Wharf and Harbourside are stylish and lively centres of restaurants and cafes, bars, nightclubs and shops with spectacular views of Sydney Harbour.

As well as being a hugely popular entertainment precinct, Darling Harbour is one of the evacuation points for Sydney’s central business district. This means that the area’s sound system must be able to reliably address a large number of people and deliver high standard crowd management and emergency response facilities.

Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority is the State Government agency responsible for managing the precinct, including security, leasing, tourism and events. In 2007, the Authority required a major upgrade of the existing audio visual system to ensure it could meet the evolving needs of the precinct.

As well as giving Darling Harbour Rangers more flexibility in making announcements, this would allow more visitors to enjoy live events by extending the reach of on-stage sound systems. During the past year the number of people attending events at Darling Harbour, such as the Latin dance and music festival, Fiesta and the renowned Australia Day Spectacular, has increased by 8.6 per cent.

The original sound system was installed 13 years ago and was extended around the water’s edge about five years ago. It included analogue distribution infrastructure with copper based reticulation of audio and video signals over distances in the order of kilometres, in an often hostile environment. Connection points for temporary interfacing are all outdoors in a salty atmosphere, which severely tested the limits of corrosion resistance techniques, compromising signal integrity and system reliability.

In February 2007, Rutledge Engineering was awarded the contract to design, supply and install a new public address system and reticulation infrastructure.

The system requirements included:

more than 300 high quality outdoor loudspeakers and associated amplifiers, distributed over 32 loudspeaker zones, allowing paging and sound reinforcement to individual zones
comprehensive patching and routing facilities, allowing Authority events staff to extend systems with additional audio and video systems if required
a number of patching connection points around the precinct, including the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre edit suite to facilitate large scale productions
fibre optic cabling across the entire site
centralised control and monitoring of the system, either from the Events Control Room at Palm Grove or the Rangers Control Room.

The new system has vastly improved public communication across Darling Harbour, enhancing safety and events for visitors.

darling harbour medium (darling harbour medium)