TEER ENGINEERING ADVANCES UNIQUE FLORIDA COMMUNITY'S ENTERTAINMENT AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY WITH HARMAN PRO GROUP HiQnet™

LONDON, ENGLAND, 10 September, 2006 - In a demonstration of the seamless plug-and-play networking advantages of Harman Pro Group's HiQnet™ configuration and control protocol for professional audio systems, Teer Engineering recently completed a HiQnet system featuring components from JBL Professional, Crown and BSS Audio at the state-of-the-art Altamonte Springs residential/commercial complex near Orlando, Florida.

Altamonte Springs is a 25-acre, master-planned community bordering on Crane's Roost Lake in Central Florida. It is designed as a work/live/play development that merges luxury residential space with retail, parks and indoor and outdoor performance venues. To bring the communications and entertainment technology expertise to the project, city planners turned to Teer Engineering in Orlando, a design and installation firm that employs the most advanced technological solutions for audio and video systems integration for boardrooms, classrooms, training facilities, home theaters, places of worship and whole communities. Immediately recognizing that the firm would need advanced technologies coupled with comprehensive support for such a large project as Altamonte Springs, president John Teer turned to the Harman Pro Group.

The planners of the community wanted a plug-and-play fiber optic infrastructure that could support everything from paging, to distributing multiple audio and video programs, simultaneously if necessary. The goal was to be able to route audio and video signals from any of nine stations located throughout the park to any zone throughout the community. If, for example, a concert was staged down by the lake, the audio engineers could go to a simple touch panel with a visual map and touch the locales to where the music would be routed. It's a simple enough system for park rangers to operate with minimal training, but sophisticated enough to route multiple digital audio and video streams anywhere, anytime. The signal can be routed to one zone only, all zones, or a select few.

"The key to the success of the Altamonte Springs system which is complex in its architecture, yet ultra simple to use, is the HiQnet foundation and the compatibility of all the Harman products designed expressly for working together in this network," said John Teer, President Teer Engineering. "Other companies are doing things with CobraNet as the foundation, but HiQnet brings everything together in a fashion that is light years ahead."

This HiQnet system at the Altamonte Springs complex sits atop a CobraNet™ backbone. Crown CTs Series amplifiers are connected to the network, driving JBL Control 25 and Control 28 loudspeakers throughout the park, with the DSP functions of the Crown amps being controlled through the HiQnet London Architect™ software. Crown USP3 cards provide data that is accessible across the network that can generate monitoring data that pop up on the visual control panels which offer ongoing status through a menu button. This makes a complex task of monitoring equipment simple and instantaneous because all the products communicate openly across the network.

Noting the complex system design coupled with the high performance and intuitive user interface, Rick Kreifeldt, Vice President, Harman Pro System Development and Integration Group observed, "It was for applications such as Altamonte Springs that we envisaged HiQnet in the first place! HiQnet enables the contractor - in this case Teer Engineering - to address a diverse amalgamation of end-user requirements and provide transparent, sophisticated network control, a highly intuitive user interface and the excellent system performance that only comes from Harman Pro Group companies including JBL Professional, Crown and BSS Audio!"

HiQnet System Architect version 1.2 is available for immediate, free-of-charge download at http://hiqnet.harmanpro.com. Install CDs with full product data will be available from the Harman Pro PLASA stand #G43 where System Architect 1.2 will be available for demonstration. HiQnet London Architect v1.10 is available for immediate, free-of-charge download at http://www.bssaudio.com.