McCormick Place, Chicago IL

With 2.6 million square feet of exhibition halls and 173 meeting rooms encompassing an additional 600,000 square feet, McCormick Place in Chicago is one of the largest convention and conference centers in the world. Its largest ballroom could hold a football field and through its many events, it annually sees close to 3 million visitors.

Like most convention spaces, McCormick Place rarely sees downtime but is in regular need of change and expansion. Therefore, reliability is the highest priority for it to continue to function. With the size and quantity of shows it hosts, failure of any system during events is not an option. Communication in particular must be incredibly yielding for each meeting room and exhibit hall use under different system constraints. Intelligibility and volume levels must be apt in all locations, at all times from high ceiling halls to public concourses, food courts, and lobby areas. It was preferred that meeting rooms have limited control available with system controls elsewhere and as with most public areas, a reliable emergency notification system was required. IED has been the vendor of choice for every McCormick Place expansion since 1993 mainly because the extreme reliability and flexibility offered meet all of their specific needs. The overall system is networked with a 510ACS mainframe for system wide paging and is controlled from a custom IED Convention Center GUI. Control rooms manage combining for the meeting rooms and gathering areas throughout the center and the GUI supports dynamic stage mapping, which allows the ability to drag and drop stage locations in the exhibition halls and automatically configure time delays for source localization.

System processing and room combining for all meeting rooms and exhibition halls is provided by an array of T9032DSP nodes but the architecture also includes analog 4800 automatic mixers and 6000 power amplifiers in the local communication rooms for local control of the inputs and a full analog bypass in case of a core DSP problem. Ambient analysis is used to ensure proper volume while IED’s emergency and evacuation system was added to protect those in attendance.