Sheraton Grand Doha Resort & Convention Hotel

Challenge

Provide a wireless audio solution across the entire meeting and conferencing facilities of the hotel, which consist of 22 venues ranging from small meeting rooms to big banquet venues.

Solution

The venues were equipped with 120 Sennheiser 3000/5000 Series Microphones, 400 AND-W wireless delegate units as well 4000 Sennheiser HDE-2020 receivers and 21 SR 2020 transmitters for translation systems.

In what has been one of the largest and most complex wireless audio system deployments in the Middle East, the Sheraton Doha, an iconic five-star hotel in the capital of Qatar, has successfully leveraged Sennheiser solutions to roll out a state-of-the-art wireless conference and translation system across its entire meeting and conferencing facilities. The landmark project, which was handled by the DOUMMAR Group, ensures that the Sheraton Doha can offer the very best event, meeting and conference facilities to its customers.

“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 meticulous 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 frequen cy 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.

cy 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.

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.

Perhaps most impressively, Q2 Advanced Technology Contracting LLC and Sennheiser Middle East managed to plan, supply, commission and test all these systems in a short fivemonth 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 Ryan Burr, Technical Sales.

Manager for Sennheiser Middle East. Mr Jean A. Doummar, CEO of the Group, stated, „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 in Doha, orchestrated and led by our Operations Manager Mr. Esber Nasrallah.”