FORT LAUDERDALE, FL — Now Hear This: A total of 77 Meyer Sound loudspeakers are installed in 10 venues staffed by some of the 1,500 crew members aboard the 2,850-passenger Celebrity Solstice, the first of Celebrity Cruises’ five-ship Solstice Class fleet. FUNA International and Celebrity Cruises jointly decided on the Meyer gear, based on past experience.
“I’ve always liked the sound quality of the Meyer loudspeakers,” said Wayne Tepley, corporate production manager, who is a veteran of 13 years at sea as an audio engineer. “But I also appreciate the extraordinary reliability. I can’t think of a problem I’ve had with a Meyer speaker, ever. They are just rock solid. That’s critical, because you don’t want systems going down when you’re in the middle of the Atlantic.”
FUNA International designed and installed the AV and show control systems onboard Celebrity Solstice. Principal designers Wolfgang Bokker and Peter Scheffler handled the bulk of the workload from the company’s offices in Germany, with supporting coordination by senior vice president Marc Goossens, based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
“Certainly the audio quality is exceptional, but we also like them because they’re self-powered, which makes them easy to install and commission,” said Goossens. “They sound great out of the box, so we don’t spend days EQ’ing a room.”
With frills ranging from a real lawn, glassblowing exhibitions, an art gallery, and five specialty restaurants, the hub of shipboard entertainment is a 1,115-seat semicircular theatre equipped with a Meyer Sound system including four CQ-1 and three CQ-2 main loudspeakers with bass support from a pair of 700-HP subwoofers. Frontfill is provided by 10 discreet MM-4 miniature loudspeakers, with other fill effects duties assigned to nine UPJ-1P VariO loudspeakers and four UPM-1P loudspeakers.
The smaller 200-seat Celebrity Central venue is a flexible studio space offering live music, comedy and movies. Sound support comes from four UPM-1P and seven UPM-2P loudspeakers, with low-frequency energy augmented by two UMS-1P subwoofers.
The FUNA designers also specified Meyer Sound UltraSeries loudspeakers in the Ensemble and Sky Lounges, the Entertainment and Rendezvous Courts, the two children’s and teen spaces, Spa Motion Aerobics and the crew gymnasium and the crew disco.
The simplicity of self-powered systems “takes out a whole layer of complexity,” said Tepley. “If you have amplifiers and processing in a separate place, you have all that signal and speaker cabling. But with the amplification, processing, and speaker all in one place, you just feed it an audio signal and the speaker takes care of the rest. It greatly simplifies troubleshooting.”
Tepley acknowledged that working under pressure, many shipboard audio operators can make mistakes with potentially damaging consequences. In this regard, the simplicity of Meyer Sound self-powered systems—with fewer connect/disconnect points—greatly reduces the chances of failure. “If you lose a critical component, in some parts of the world it can take weeks to get a replacement,” says Tepley. “For me, the best thing about the Meyer systems is their reliability and durability.”
The Celebrity Solstice made its maiden voyage through the Caribbean in November 2008. Its cruising schedule for 2009-2010 includes transatlantic and Mediterranean itineraries.
For more information, please visit www.meyersound.com.
