Inside $2.3M Hard Rock Hotel Install

Everything is supposed to be hard at the Hard Rock Hotel. But listening to music just became whole a lot easier. Guests in the new 16-story South Tower suites only need to use their in-room touchpanels to play music from the hotel's own music library or access digital audio from their own iPods.

But while listening is easy, the design and installation of new in-room audio entertainment systems was hard … or slightly difficult to say the least. But the crew at FBP Systems in Las Vegas used their collective creativity to overcome the daunting challenges in the design and installation of the unique audio system.

The new wing of the hotel, which opened last December and contains 318 luxury suites, presented numerous challenges for FBP, including:

• Designing a system that includes an intuitive touchpanel interface (AMX) and an in-wall iPod docking system (iPort) easy enough for hotel guests to operate with zero training
• Working within an extremely limited budget that ruled out the possibility of dedicated music servers for every room
• Supporting a requirement that the installation team be composed of union workers
• Abiding by an extremely tight installation timeline (two weeks!)
• Following an edict that the audio system not include monthly service fees (i.e., no Rhapsody, satellite or cable TV music feed)
• Creating a system that uses in-room digital audio players (Alcorn McBride) to access an off-site music server run by the music guru of the Hard Rock (a server that doesn't include access to album art)
• Using other contractors to pull and test the low-voltage wire runs in the tower
• Carrying an insurance bond on the job and having to purchase the equipment upfront

Hard? You bet. Impossible? Nope. Even with only six full-time employees, FBP Systems pulled it off. The result is a $2.3 million installation ($1.4 million dedicated to the South Tower) that rocks … literally.

Partnering with Union Electrician

FBP Systems has been in business for nearly four years, with its specialty focusing on servicing existing systems, mainly restaurant and lounges. Often while he was on-site doing repairs of installations, Bob Athey realized he could have done the installations differently in many cases. So, he migrated to installations.

FBP, which has six employees, provides repair service for the Hard Rock Hotel. That relationship, along with a history of on-budget performance, put the company in position to be considered for the South Tower job. In the new tower alone, FBP not only did the in-room systems, but also installed three of the fashionable live stage venues - Vanity, Wasted Spaces and Body English - complete from lighting to audio, including DJ systems. The Vanity nightclub installation earned FBP about the same revenue as the in-room installations in the new tower, according to Athey.

About six months ago, FBP became a subsidiary of The Morse Group, a large electrical contractor in Las Vegas that was ranked as the 35th largest electrical contractor in the U.S. in 2009 with over $100 million in revenue. That partnership, in essence, made FBP the low-voltage arm of Morse, which has 600 employees. Athey says joining Morse Group was vital in helping FBP secure the South Tower contract for several reasons.

First, it improved FBP's efficiency by providing operational resources, freeing up the staff's time to concentrate on getting new business. Second, The Morse Group gave FBP the financial resources to be able to purchase the equipment and an insurance bond necessary for the Hard Rock installation without causing a cash flow crunch. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the Hard Rock Hotel job required the use of a union contractor. Since Morse Electric is a union shop, FBP was able to utilize the company's C2 license to secure the job.

Designing the System

The executives of the Hard Rock didn't know exactly what they wanted, they just knew they wanted something to help solidify the venue's reputation as the "music hotel" in Las Vegas and they wanted to bring that experience to the guests in every room. It was up to FBP to design a system that filled that need and stayed within the slim $2.3 million budget.

In a nutshell, each one of the 318 suites has an AMX NXD-CV12 12-inch touchpanel, an AMX NI -7100 NetLinx integrated controller, an iPort in-wall iPod system, and an Alcorn McBride AM4 digital music player. The components are all managed by an AMX NI -3100 master.

FBP worked with AMX to design a custom bezel for each touchpanel. This was necessary because the hotel had already installed about half the tower with certain-sized electrical back boxes before the touchpanel decision was made. To fit the panel that the Hard Rock wanted, AMX had to redesign the bezel of the NXDs.

The panel connects to an NI -700 NetLinx integrated controller in each suite, which connects to two serial devices - the iPort and the AM4 music player (not a server). The Hard Rock has its own music server that is managed by its own music guru based in Los Angeles who creates and manages the playlists for all the music heard at Hard Rock properties, including restaurants and hotels.

The library, which was created years ago when the first restaurants opened, has about 2,000 songs taking up about 1.6 gigs of memory. The Hard Rock did not want a system that required a monthly fee. Finally, the hotel wanted iPorts.

"They had a budget and the existing music library so we had to come up with a solution," recalls Chris Clemons, automation manager at FBP. He says FBP introduced the in-wall iPorts to the hotel. "The biggest issue was bringing them a product that would allow iPod control and song metadata to occur on a touchscreen."

According to Athey, all the other integration companies that were interested in the project proposed subscription-based systems. Regarding the missing album art, "It was one of those things that the HRH just didn't care about, I guess. We could write the code to make that happen, but within the timeline we had, it would not have been possible. Remember all the music is housed on an outside server in L.A. and we are just simply extracting the metadata from that server over the Internet."

FBP's creative solution uses an Alcorn McBride AM4 music player, which was originally developed as a device to make automatic announcements in theme parks whenever a roller coaster sped by.

According to Clemons, since the unit has a serial port, FBP engineers thought it could act as a music player. "So we worked with Alcorn McBride and with AMX to create some custom firmware to basically create a ‘music server' for the Hard Rock that would fit into the tight budget," he adds.

FBP partnered with AMX on the programming and designed everything on the screen. The rock music library is categorized using icons by decade. Other playlists are "Country," "Best of Hard Rock Hotel" and "Pop." More playlists on the screen change depending on the artists scheduled to play live concerts at the hotel. When a category icon is pressed, a rotating playlist of seven songs with artist's name and album name appears.

Located just below each touchpanel is the in-wall iPort. Guests can toggle between the iPort and the music library via two main on-screen icons to access and control their own music from either source. Each screen has a power-down mode that shuts the screen down so it's not glowing in the room all night.

There are two sponsored playlists on the screens. Hard Rock execs had an idea of what they wanted, but nothing specific. For example, during the design process FBP brought to their attention that the bottom of the touchpanel could accommodate advertisements. So, the Hard Rock marketing team now sells ads and sponsored playlists on the screens. (FBP does not share in that revenue.)



FBP trained the hotel staff to update the dynamic image graphics (change the ads) using custom Photoshop templates. An FTP server updates every panel two to three times per day. The touchpanels ping the 3100 master to go out and search for the updated dynamic images for the daily weather forecast.

All the audio emanates from a Sound Matters sound bar located under one of the two Sony flat panels in the room. There are no in-ceiling loudspeakers or subwoofers. In-ceiling speakers would have blown the budget, Athey says.

In total, 115,000 linear feet of Cat 5e wire was run in the new tower. Everything is Cat 5. Every three floors has its own Intermediate Distribution Frame (ID F) closet that houses the Hard Rock Hotel network gear and switches. From there, the wiring runs to each room where a four-port switch connects to the AMX touchpanel and the AMX master in each room. They both have IP addresses and are talking to each other. In fact, all the systems talk to each other over IP so Hard Rock will be able to upgrade to some sort of a management feature in the future, for example, for networked TV s.

It's not unusual to have a compressed timeframe on any commercial job, but imagine having only two weeks to do 318 rooms!

Fortunately, FBP was involved early on in the project. According to Ed Barrera, sales manager at FBP and former AMX exec, the Hard Rock Hotel first proposed the concept of a music library/iPort system back in October 2008, but it wasn't until August 2009 that Morse received a signed contract. The first equipment was delivered to the integrator a few months later in October 2009, and the crew immediately began configuring all the AMX masters and the AM4s. In all, it took about five weeks of programming, according to Clemons. Electrician setbacks led to FBP's installation window being squeezed from eight weeks to just two.

"The wiring was finally certified on Christmas Eve 2009," recalls Athey. "The [Hard Rock Hotel] opened six floors of the tower three days later on December 27."

To get everything up and running, the crew worked 20-hour days and actually had several of the in-room systems operating standalone versus networked. By mid-January, everything was complete.

Since completion, there have been six broken touchpanels … all caused by (possibly inebriated) guests punching their hands through the panel. In all six instances, FBP was able to confirm that the system was working perfectly.