Walter E. Washington Convention Center

Washington, DC

Client: Events DC

Completion Date: Ongoing

The Walter E. Washington Convention Center is 2.3 million square foot building covering six city blocks and is as long as two Washington Monuments laid end-to-end. It is the second largest building in Washington, DC next to the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center. The convention center is 5,230 feet end to end.

Although commissioned in 2003, the Convention Center experienced unacceptable downtime of its building wide audiovisual systems. Selected in a nationwide search, Polysonics was chosen to design replacement systems for all exhibit spaces, ballrooms, salons, meeting spaces, conference spaces, concourses, back of house paging, and common areas.

The technically complex audiovisual system design includes 71 digital signal processors, 92 power amplifiers, powering 480 audio channels over 30 miles of networked category cable. Working closely with the Convention Center technical, administrative and operations staff, the project benefits from the collaboration of customized control solutions increasing user convenience and performance oriented room systems. Mission critical reliability with zero down time, was the first and remains the most important system attribute.