Urban Outfitters Chooses the Q-SYS Ecosystem for their Philadelphia Headquarters

In 2011, Urban Outfitters moved into its new corporate campus, a complete redesign that breathed new life into the 100+ year old shell of a dilapidated navy shipyard in Philadelphia.  The facility boasts 350,000 ft² of space for its brands including Free People and Anthropologie. The campus, which includes a number of common areas like the cafeteria, coffee shop, library, fitness center and outdoor courtyard, was in need of a more integrated and flexible networked audio, video and control (AV&C) system. QSC was up to the task with the Q-SYS AV&C Ecosystem.

The audio visual upgrade was a collaborative process between DBS Audio, who had provided the loudspeaker systems and Essential Communications, who had installed the original control and processing system. David Schwartz, founder of Essential Communications was looking for a more tightly integrated AV&C solution.

“By deploying a single processor, we greatly simplified the installation without sacrificing on features,“ explained David Schwartz. “Because Q-SYS offers audio, video and control in a single device, we reduced the number of interconnection points, which results in much less programming time.” The previous control processor and DSP were replaced with just one Q-SYS Core110f Unified processor, which manages the AV&C processing for the entire installation. To further expedite the installation, they also deployed a Q-SYS NS-1124P network switch, pre-configured specifically to meet the performance requirements of Q-SYS AV&C systems. This represented an enormous time-savings when installing Q-SYS on a local AV network.

User control is provided via three Q-SYS network touch screen controllers, which allow for audio level and source select controls in each of the zones. Essential Communications took advantage of the Q-SYS UCI Editor to build simple-to-use UCIs for any user to control. The UCI Editor offers drag-and-drop programming, which allowed the integrator to quickly build UCIs without the need to do any actual programming.

“What I love about Q-SYS is that it doesn’t make any sacrifices to provide a better experience for both the end-user and us, as the integrator,” Schwartz explained further. “The tools provided to the integrator simplify and expedite the installation process, while its feature set enables us to deliver the absolute best experience for our end-user.”

User Control Interface