Located under a blanket of snow in the small, riverside village of Jukkasjärvi in Lapland, Sweden, the Ice hotel 365 provides you with a truly unique experience.
“The environment in an ice hotel is white, cold, transparent and very fragile,” explains Matti Eklund, owner of local integration company Matti Eklund AB (MEAB). “Obviously most technical equipment has the opposite characteristics, so this was a significant challenge for us.” The world’s first ice hotel attracts between 50,000 and 60,000 visitors to the village of Jukkasjärvi, with a little over 700 inhabitants, found 200km north of the Arctic Circle. Yet the site melting each spring meant revenue could only previously be seasonal. Its new extension, the 2,100-sq-metre ‘Icehotel 365’ is the world’s first hotel made of ice and snow to be open throughout the year – thanks to a newly developed solar-powered cooling system.
Tasked with deciding on the best audio solution for the hotel without knowledge of the rooms’ final design or function in detail, Eklund pitched a digital sound matrix system from Audac, scalable to four different zones that could be controlled individually by the hotel’s technical lead. This was to be divided into the internal entrance, bar, event area and the background music system. Two additional zones (the external entrance area and corridor) were added, alongside control panels in each of the main hall zones. “We now have unlimited potential to expand the system in the future with the Audac M2 Matrix system,” comments Eklund. He chose Audac for its suitability for the environment – both in terms of temperature conditions and energy consumption of the EPA series D class amplifier (suited to the hotel’s strict sustainability policy) powering the system.
The project was completed just ahead of its opening in November 2016, and connects to the large IceHotel site each winter. 130,000 kWh of energy conserved from Sweden’s midnight sun 100 days of the year, powers the hotel’s facilities throughout the year. “Guests of Icehotel 365 have commented both on the good sound and how invisible the equipment is in the ice and snow environment,” says Eklund, who will continue to support and maintain the system as it grows in the future.
Source: InAVate magazine
