The Brief

MRP and parent company First Derivatives were moving to new offices in Armagh House, Belfast. This is an old mill building with existing wooden flooring, open ceilings and large windows. Due to the acoustic challenges of hard surfaces and a large number of staff, Fluid AV were contracted to install a sound masking solution throughout the 2 floors.

The Solution

A sound masking solution from our partners, Cambridge Sound Management was designed and installed to reduce noise distractions, protect speech privacy and to improve workplace acoustics. Sound masking is an ambient sound, similar to the sound of airflow, that’s specifically engineered to the frequency of human speech you can target conversational distractions and make them less distracting. Sound masking does not cancel sound or eliminate all speech noise in an environment; it simply reduces how far away conversations can be heard and understood by others, which we call the radius of distraction.

The client also carries out weekly update broadcasts which are shown both locally and internationally such as their offices in Philadelphia. Fluid AV consulted with the client to enable us to design a bespoke system that would fit the clients requirements. A number of wireless mics, which are controlled automatically through an audio DSP, are used in conjunction with high quality PTZ cameras which can then be streamed to the in house PA system, local monitors and the remote sites.

This helps keep the large number of worldwide staff up to date.

A number of meeting rooms were also installed ranging from the larger video conferencing rooms with 86” monitors to the smaller huddle rooms. The video conferencing rooms were optimised for both Microsoft Teams and Cisco WebEx calls throughout. We are currently seeing this as a growing trend with our customers as the move to services like Office 365 and G Suite make video conferencing part of everyday life.