Alcorn McBride Rideplayer | The Audio brain
Every engine rumble, every cricket chirp, every walkie-talkie "beep", every tribal drum beat, and every ESTOP spiel was powered by an Alcorn McBride Rideplayer. This fantastic piece of hardware is the center of the immersion for this ride, creating 16 channels of high-quality audio to truly place riders into the environment of the jungle.
Its incredible mixing, networking, sync, and rugged functionality made this not only a reliable and impressive piece of equipment but one that was easy to program and even easier to troubleshoot.
In Winscript Live, Alcorn McBride's control software, a million sequences were created. A queue environment loop outputs jungle sounds and 1940s jazz to the 4 individual queue speakers, along with environmental audio synced to the rest of the speakers on the ride path. Even when the vehicle is in the station, you could walk along the track and you would feel like you are in the jungle.
When the ride is dispatched, the control system commands the rideplayer to slightly duck the volume of the ride path environment audio by a player volume command, triggers a dispatch timeline (in which you can hear the engine startup in the queue), and then once the ride vehicle reaches the first track position, the show starter timeline is played. This timeline mainly consists of 3 tracks, Narration, Music, and Engine sounds. Within the sequence, I have routed the audio to all of the scene 1 speakers within Winscript in order to maintain crystal clear narration while providing a sufficient volume of background elements, and easy reprogramming functionality. After the ride vehicle reaches the scene 2 starting position, the rideplayer fades this new scene audio into the scene 2 speakers with a similarly structured timeline consisting of 3 tracks.
Here’s an example of the logic behind one of my favorite ride audio features:
once the ride vehicle reaches scene 3, the control system triggers a boarding announcement spiel in the queue. Within the 2 boarding speakers facing the attraction guests at the front of the queue, the background volume is ducked by 7db. A quick announcement is made introducing the story and providing some safety information, and then after the volume is restored back to 0db. This queue announcement is perfectly timed to cover most of the screams inside the ride ;) No matter what is triggered by the control system to playback, the background environmental audio always remains in sync systemwide.
Virtual environment sponsored by Scans Factory
Produced by Cal Rustad
