Other related pages:
- Wonderland Audio Stuff
- The Tale of… Space Probe 7
- Space Probe Audio
- Those Ride P.A. Systems
- The Tale… of The Sound Room.
- 24 volt Amplifiers
- The Woolshed
By this time we had the second generation Mushroom speakers. Management had decided to make a wild life park to capitalize on the overseas tourist market. Audio was brought up to speed on what they had in mind and we drew up plans. After a bit of tweaking, we got the go ahead. Probably the biggest problem we had was the project manager didn’t want to give us the larger size of electrical pipes that we need to bury our cables underground. We had a lot of trouble getting all our cables through the pipes. The basic system was a copy of the rest of the park. The only difference was the wild life park(WLP) was stereo, and not mono like the rest of the park at that time.
The background sound track was sourced from several CD’s of Australian bird and bush sounds, all done in stereo. We created it in-house. On the night before the Official opening, I was walking through the WLP and it was very apparent that the local birds were interacting with the birds on the recorded sound track. That was very rewarding, as the sound track had been my responsibility.
The Reptile / Koala Show P.A. System was just a simple 200w P.A. system with a lapel radio microphone. We had to have several spare lapel mics, as one would get damaged every few months when one of the one of the animals forgot to follow the script.
At one point they added a koala holding room off to the side of show area. They drilled a few holes into the floor to mount some “trees” for the koalas to perch in. A few days later, I got a request to find out why there was no sound in the wildlife park. Well…… One of the “holes” went straight through my cables from the sound room. It was no fun fishing my now koala pee soaked cables out of the hole and joining them back together.
About five years later, they decided to install a covered raised walkway along with several enclosure to keep animals in so the guests could look down and see the animals better. Part of the project was to have an audio system that would tell “Dream Time” stories in four different languages. From memory, it was Japanese, Mandarin, French, and German. I could be wrong on one or two of those. Rod Nielsen did all our audio department computer software writing. He used GW Basic and later Quick Basic. The PC for this project had 4 CD players in it, and by pushing one of four vandal proof buttons, it would play the chosen language through a Mini Dino speaker mounted beneath the button console.
Kent Learned