Peavey Commercial Audio Wins Audio Installation of the Year AV Award

	AV Magazine editor, Clive Couldwell; Peavey Commercial Audio European operations manager, James Kennedy; MediaMatrix product specialist, Stephen Joy; and presenter, Russell Kane.

Peavey Commercial Audio has won the 2012 Audio Installation of the Year AV Award for the extensive MediaMatrix installation at the Qatar National Convention Center. Representatives for Peavey Commercial Audio accepted the honor at the 2012 AV Awards ceremony held in London on October 12.

"Winning this award is a true honor," said Hartley Peavey, founder and CEO of Peavey Electronics. "Twenty years ago, we launched MediaMatrix as the world's first computer-based audio processing and control network, which revolutionized the commercial sound industry. Since that time, Peavey MediaMatrix and Commercial Audio have provided solutions for more than 10,000 venues around the world. As one of the largest and most technologically advanced convention centers in the Middle East, The Qatar National Convention Center was an ideal project to highlight the innovations and solutions that make Peavey Commercial Audio an industry leader."

Peavey European Commercial Audio operations manager James Kennedy said, "We're ecstatic. We are very proud to have been involved in such a prestigious project with our partner Techno Q, and to win an award in our maiden appearance here is special."

MediaMatrix product specialist Stephen Joy added, "Enormous credit goes out to Abdulla Alansari and his team at Techno Q for the remarkable job they have done in designing and implementing our technology."

Located minutes from Qatar's central business district in the heart of Education City, a global hub of ideas and innovation including elite universities, research and technology institutions, the new Qatar National Convention Center is an unparalleled modern convention facility, boasting iconic design and cutting-edge facilities in a new and revolutionary green-technology venue.

This world-class space -- the first of its kind built to the gold certification of US Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED) -- features a distributed audio and video system anchored by MediaMatrix that connects QNCC's 431,000-sq.-ft. of exhibition hall, 52 meeting rooms, and public spaces that span luxury lounges, hospitality suites, exhibition foyers, a 2,300-seat theater, and three additional tiered auditoriums.

Such a varied-use complex required support for all manner of digital audio -- everything from background music to broadcast -- and every area needed central as well as local control capabilities.

"The MediaMatrix NIONs are the backbone of the system," said Ahmed Abdel Kadar, projects engineer with Techno Q, in an interview about the installation with Pro Audio Middle East. With 82 MediaMatrix NION n3 processors and 91 CAB 4n units connected over CobraNet, the audio engineers at QNCC can send audio to any location on the network. More than 150 miles of fiber-optic cabling connect the outlying systems to a central control room where the audio team can also monitor the condition and status of power amplifiers on the network.

"The very latest technology has been applied throughout this building and it was a very good design," Kader said. "And as far as the ability to route any system anywhere -- they have the capability to do just about anything you would expect in the 21st Century."