Increasingly, condominium and resort developments are evolving into high-tech communities where residents are surrounded by amenities made to deliver immersive entertainment experiences, engaging social events, and spaces where guests can simply sit back and relax. So when the Casa Mira View community in San Diego was looking to construct a recreational center for its thousands of residents, only a state-of-the-art 40,000-square-foot facility would satisfy the development’s desire to bring guests the absolute best in commercial recreation. Touting a bowling alley, sports bar, gyms, tech rooms, an outdoor spa, a karaoke system, and more, the uniquely designed center relies on RTI’s advanced portfolio of innovative interfaces to seamlessly control hundreds of A/V components. The result? A fun, engaging, and fully integrated environment that remains incredibly easy to use for any staff member or community resident.

“The developer was looking to create a flagship recreational center at Casa Mira View that would surpass anything they’ve offered in the past,” said Shawn Worst, president of Evolution Home Theater, Inc. “Used as both a sales tool to wow potential buyers and as an area to entertain resident guests, the four-floor installation had to be extremely simple for users to operate since so many zones, components, and applications were involved. To remove any complexities from the selection and operation process, we designed the entire system around RTI’s control products. Renowned for their reliability, flexibility, and powerful performance, I was able to easily program every user interface to make controlling A/V anywhere within the enormous facility consist of a simple touchscreen process. People are amazed by just how powerful yet simple the system is to use.”

To easily control audio and video in any room across the facility, the recreational center’s staff can use any of the center’s four iPads running the RTiPanel app — providing simple touchscreen activation and management of a wide range of applications including the bowling alley’s visual effects, any of the area’s 24 audio zones, or specific components such as the more than 20 LED TV screens installed throughout the center. RTI’s Integration Designer^® programming software allowed the integrator to create intuitive interfaces where users can select, control, and monitor the on/off status of audio or video equipment, change settings such as volume levels, or choose different sources at the tap of a screen. The heart of the entire installation is a single RTI XP-8s control processor, which brings the facility advanced control interface options including two-way RS-232, relay, routable IR, and Ethernet control to provide lightning fast processing power across the innovative recreation space.

Within specific rooms such as the gym, spin space, leasing offices, or the center’s boxing room, staff including fitness trainers or office personnel can also select audio using RTI’s RKM-1 in-wall audio distribution keypads. Designed for flush-mount installations in walls or cabinets, the intuitive keypads allow local zone audio control without disrupting the settings’ modern-looking design. Other localized control options include the installation of RTI’s KX2 in-wall touchpanel keypads within the facility’s two tech lounges. Featuring 2.8-inch QVGA color LCD displays with  customizable interfaces, the panels are configured to automatically turn on TVs and select  appropriate audio sources — giving residents the ability to watch entertaining content from Blu-ray movies or cable TV without any tedious maneuvering between components. Audio across the recreational center, including amplifiers, subwoofers, and hundreds of speakers is supported by three RTI AD-8x audio distribution systems. Designed for larger residential and commercial installations, the AD-8x combines a 16-channel audio amplifier with a matrix-switching preamplifier. The unit is also equipped with intuitive Web interfaces to accelerate any installation process by letting integrators test output zones via a Web browser on any PC, smartphone, or tablet. 

To customize control even further, staff members can access local audio libraries or popular streaming music services from any private IOS or Android device. By connecting the integrator’s custom-made “Evodocks” directly into RTI’s versatile audio system, users such as gym trainers simply drop their personal device into any of the six universal media docs and select audio from RTI’s RKM-1 keypads to let playlists pump out from their current setting’s sound system. The flexibility of RTI components also brings unique customization capabilities to the recreational center’s bowling alley. Combining a rotating disco ball, laser show, and smoke machine, staff members can easily transform the atmosphere into “disco bowl” by selecting a custom preset button directly on their RTI interface. To create this ambient effect, RTI’s XP-8s allows both the smoke machine and lasers to connect to switchable power outlets, enabling control via relay directly from the innovative control processor.

“Since programming RTI solutions is so straight-forward and intuitive, large complex installations become more cost-effective for the integrator community,” added Worst. “Using the company’s Integration Designer, programming complexity is greatly reduced meaning I can do everything myself. This removes the cost and additional completion time that would be required if I needed to hire an outside programmer. As a result, I consistently place more competitively when bidding for projects and can address challenges myself as soon as they arise instead of adjusting timelines to accommodate external collaborators. When combining these advantages with an incredibly low failure rate, RTI’s flexibility results in a rock-solid product line that allows me to easily satisfy unique customer requirements.” 

“Training staff members to use the RTI interfaces on the entire system literally took five minutes,” said [name], [title], Casa Mira View. “Simple, reliable, and extremely powerful, the system’s innovative A/V capabilities also put our recreational center on an entirely new level of community entertainment. Loved by both employees and residents, we’ve decided to replicate the installation in one of our smaller properties while planning out an even larger system for a new development early next year. We are incredibly impressed by just how many amenities were customized to meet our specific needs — the system is both seamless to operate and amazing to experience.”