Sheraton Doha ups MICE game with wireless system

Sheraton Doha has deployed one of the world’s largest wireless audio systems, powered by Sennheiser. The deployment, handled by the Doummar Group, will be rolled out across all meeting and conferencing facilities.

“The Sheraton Doha spared no expense and every system that has been utilised is absolutely first class,” said Esber Nasrallah, operations manager for Q2 Advanced Technology Contracting LLC, a member of the Doummar Group of companies, which handled the entire AV portion of the hotel's renovation.

“It was decided to use wireless systems in order to deliver maximum flexibility in terms of mobility, portability and scale. The hotel wanted to be able to add or remove microphones and receivers effortlessly across the twelve expansive conference rooms as per guests’ requirements.”

Besides the challenge of accommodating over 200 channels into the UHF spectrum while avoiding intermodulation and interference, the team had to convince the regulatory authority in Qatar that it would not operate in certain frequency bands.

The planning required to accomplish these tasks was aided by a specialised software called Sennheiser Intermodulation Frequency Management (SIFM) which allowed the team to input the frequency ranges and receive a detailed frequency distribution plan for the building.

As there is no frequency overlapping of channels, Sheraton Doha can move transmitters about for portability without concerns of intermodulation and interference. The stringent wireless security requirements were overcome by a combination of Sennheiser's proprietary signal encoding and industry-standard 128-bit AES encryption.

The project saw the deployment of 120 Sennheiser 3000/5000 Series microphones with Neumann KK-104 capsules - a combination used by many of the world's most famous music artists.

Also utilised were 400 ADN-W wireless delegate units for the portable conferencing systems, as well as 4000 Sennheiser HDE-2020 receivers and 21 SR-2020 transmitters for the translations systems - representing the largest and second largest global deployments for the Sennheiser conference and translation systems respectively.

Q2 Advanced Technology Contracting LLC and Sennheiser Middle East planned, supplied, commissioned and tested all these systems in a five month timeframe.

“We flew in experts from our headquarters in Germany and scaled our production to meet the project demands. Even with the extremely tight deadlines, we did not compromise on quality and attention to detail. We have received no negative feedback on the installation and no calls to assist or remedy any defect in the installation. This is despite the fact that the system is being used for daily events at the iconic venue, which I believe is best testament to the quality of the systems and the implementation,” concluded Sennheiser Middle East technical sales manager Ryan Burr.

Doummar Group CEO Jean A. Doummar said: "The success of our endeavour at the Sheraton is the result of a quality centric management team and spirit and a tight collaboration between our partner Sennheiser, our back office in Beirut and front office is Doha, orchestrated and led by our Operations Manager Mr. Esber Nasrallah."