Sun International pioneers audio streaming on gaming floors.
Gaming, Leisure and Hospitality group, Sun International (SI), which owns a number of casinos in Southern Africa uses the latest computerized slot machines on their gaming floors. Smartcards have replaced coins, screens and pushbuttons have replaced the traditional mechanical counters and arms. But this technology has a down side – the excitement created by the sounds of mechanical one-arm-bandits spilling coins into their trays was missing.
Realising that they needed to re-create the atmosphere on their gaming floors, SI approached Audiotech for a solution. Audiotech proposed installing small, localized sound systems on each bank of slot machines which could be used to play ambient sound effects, messages and jingles when a jackpot was won.The choice of loudspeakers was simple – the BOSE Freespace 3 speaker system with its small, good looking satellites and hide-away bass module would provide just the quality sound required for this project – but the challenge was to provide a method of co-ordinating and distributing audio content to each system, while allowing each system to operate independently
Because an Ethernet infrastructure was present at all the slot banks, Audiotech decided that streaming audio over the network to each slot bank would be more cost effective than installing dedicated audio cables, and chose the Barix Exstreamer as a network audio player. The next step was to produce a custom software solution to coordinate the functions of the system and manage each Exstreamer on the network without any operator input. The simple, yet effective browser based software suite:
Listens for jackpot activity on the slots control network and initiates a jingle playback to the Exstreamer in that specific slot bank
- Maintains and manages a schedule of timed announcements and implements playback via the Exstreamers
- Maintains and manages a randomly generated selection of ambient sound effects, and plays these back through a random selection of individual Exstreamers.
The end solution was exstremely effective, and the hardware/software combination has been deployed in all SI casinos both nationally and internationally.
