When making the drive between Bend, OR and Boise, ID, travelers may note the trip is plentiful in beautiful natural scenery, but perhaps lacking in fun pit stops. One bright spot recently became a full-fledged tourist destination, however. Worthy Brewing, which has been brewing craft beers in Bend since 2012, recently completed an audiovisual installation that simplifies operation for the staff while creating an experience that is out of this world for visitors.
A Symetrix Jupiter 8 distributes music from a Pandora Mood player to feed the Beermuda Triangle bar.
“It’s on the outskirts of town, just about the last place between Bend and Boise,” said Tony Sprando, owner of systems integrator Audio Visual Bend, which worked on the project. “It’s a great experience for travelers to have a nice place to stop, where they’ll experience something they’ve never seen before. It’s also a regular stop for locals, too, who like to support the local owner and their local brewery.”
The brewery is expansive, more than proving it’s worth as a detour. It features a beer garden patio where they grow hop plants for use in brews and for breeding research; a 20-table banquet space called Hop Mahal; the Beermuda Triangle, an extension of the main dining room that serves food sourced from local suppliers; the mezzanine-level Star Bar; and, most notably, the Hopservatory. Here, a separate column structure with a spiral staircase is topped by a small observatory with a telescope, where visitors can explore the cosmos during tours hosted in conjunction with the Oregon Observatory at Sunriver.
Upon entering the Transporter Room at the base of the Hopservatory column, visitors are greeted by three LG 43-inch UX340C Commercial Lite Ultra High Definition displays. The center display tells the story of the Hopservatory, which is operated by the Worthy Garden Club, while the others show footage with accompanying audio from two SnapAV Episode 650 Commercial Series 70-volt pendant speakers—which were chosen both for their sound quality, and also for their spherical shape, giving an impression of planets.
“The displays also receive a feed from the telescope from the dome, so at night, they can switch the source, and it will show the content coming from the telescope,” said Sprando. “That is very cool. You can hang out, drink a beer, and watch what’s on view from space on the display.”
Sprando specified a four-in, four-out Symetrix Jupiter 4 DSP in the Hopservatory building. “The Jupiter 4 manages three zones because the dome observatory, its control room, and the kiosks in the Transporter Room are completely different applications,” he said. “In addition to the screens in the Transporter Room, the second zone sends music to a control room to keep the person there from getting bored. The third zone provides spacey, prerecorded music you can enjoy in the observatory while looking through the telescope.” For streaming content to these areas, video, outer space images, and music, Sprando chose a BrightSign media player.
Because of such varied AV needs, keeping zones separate was an important focus throughout the Worthy Brewing site. “There are several independent, functional spaces that needed to be sent audio, video, and speech,” Sprando said. “It was important to separate the different sections into separate zones.”
A Symetrix Jupiter 8 distributes music from a Pandora Mood player to feed the Beermuda Triangle bar, as well as bathrooms on the first and second floors, and the mezzanine level.
In the Transporter Room at the base of the Hopservatory column, visitors are greeted by three LG 43-inch UX340C Commercial Lite Ultra High Definition displays that show a feed from the telescope from the dome at night.
“By using the Jupiter 8 to create multiple zones, instead of the more common approach of having one big zone, the client can have customized music and applications in every space, and we don’t need a volume control in each room,” Sprang said. “The Symetrix programming interface is beautiful and simple, and it looks and works the same as it does on the ARC control panel. I don’t have to send my guys for a week of training.”
Another eight-in, eight-out Jupiter 8 is installed in the Hop Mahal banquet hall, which can be used for parties, meetings, and presentations. “Although it’s one big space, we divided the front and rear of the hall into two zones to eliminate feedback issues and enable custom volume settings,” he said.
Because of the range of possible uses for the space, they provided multiple inputs for microphones, laptops, a cable box, and more. The space also includes a Da-Lite Contour Electrol screen and a BenQ SH963 full HD network projector.
“The owners didn’t want it to look like a static presentation room,” Sprando said about finding the right projector and screen solution for the space. “We had to find a solution that would work with daytime brightness as well as evenings.” The combination, he said, has been tightly installed in the ceiling and is not visible against the attractive light fixtures.
The revamped spaces have already gotten a lot of use, including holiday parties and employee appreciation nights, during their first few months in use.
“First it was just a bar, and now they have rentable and educational spaces,” Sprando said. “I come from a design-first, install-later mentality, so we made sure they had everything they needed for that.”
Mary Bakija is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, NY.
