The Cincinnati Zoo features a world-class menagerie of animals from far and wide, including lions, monkeys, manatees, and a baby hippo named Fiona that has recently stolen the hearts of its 1.8 million annual visitors. Emphasizing an innovative approach, the Cincinnati Zoo emphasizes education, outreach, conservation, and giving every visitor a unique experience with wildlife that they would not have anywhere else. What the zoo lacked until recently was a reliable audio system for delivering messages throughout its sprawling campus.
In addition to providing pristine sounding music throughout the zoo campus, the new multi-point DEVA system also helps with communication and messaging challenges: "With as many guests as the zoo attracts, we recognized the need for the paging system that could clearly and effectively deliver messages throughout our space," says Dutch Mulholland, IT / AV Director of the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Gardens. In his hunt for a practical solution, Mulholland discovered power of the DEVA wireless multimedia device.
Mulholland's first exposure to DEVA was at InfoComm three years ago. "I immediately saw the potential of all this in a wireless unit," he says. "I saw it again there last year and was really impressed with its current capabilities, so we decided to investigate it as a possible solution for our security messaging needs." Mulholland in his team built a heat map of their wireless access point coverage in the zoo and correlated that with projected DEVA coverage and determined that it would be a viable solution.
"Festival of Lights is an event that has been going on for 35 years," says Yelton. "It started out as a small event with a bunch of luminaires lighting the pathways and a couple trees that were lit. Now we have over 3 million lights and displays of all kinds." With the expansion of the lighting display and growing audiences, the zoo was keen to improve how it distributed its audio during the event.
"One of the big pushes this year was to make sure that our sound quality throughout the park was on point," Yelton says. "Having music playing really helps give you that warm holiday feeling, which was really important to us to capture." Playing music with DEVA is both significantly easier to use and more versatile than the antiquated playback system that predated it, which involved starting separate CD players in multiple locations around the zoo.
Following the Festival of Lights, the Cincinnati Zoo plans to deploy an additional 50 DEVA units throughout the park, including 10 DEVA HD units. "Distributing the additional 50 units around the zoo will allow us to set the base volume of each even lower, ensuring that you visitors won't be overwhelmed even if they're standing right below one of the speakers," Mulholland says. "We will use the DEVA HDs specifically for some of our key exhibits.