Q-SYS Enables Fun and Games at Knoebels Amusement Park

Located in Central Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River Valley, Knoebels is America's largest free-admission amusement park. It boasts over 60 rides, games, award winning food and a 900,000 gallon pool filled with refreshing mountain stream water. The time to rethink the AV system came during an extensive park upgrade and QSC was ready for the challenge with the Q-SYS™ Ecosystem.

Drewe Knaskie, Knoebels’ audio technician, was tasked with finding an AV solution that would fulfill the current requirements while keeping the future in mind. “In my researching of other parks, it became clear that Q-SYS was the perfect solution,” Knaskie explained. “Our current requirements included zone paging and simple user control, but we needed something that would support our potential future needs as well. Because Q-SYS is software-based, we can continue adding features and functionality to our system without worrying about additional hardware or complicated programming.”

The park deployed redundant Q-SYS Core 510i Integrated processors which manage the audio and control processing throughout the park. Q-SYS also features a software-based paging platform that allows operators to send live or pre-recorded messages to any of the 24 different audio zones. 

Knoebels did not need external control processors and instead, took full advantage the Q-SYS Control engine. With the help of Q-SYS UCI Editor, Knaskie built custom user control interfaces (UCI) that give operators full routing and volume control of the park’s background music. They also used Command Scheduling to automate some processes, such as background music that starts/stops at specific times. 

Loudspeakers throughout are powered by twelve QSC CXD Series DSP amplifiers. These amplifiers offer a full-featured onboard loudspeaker processing DSP, including crossover and parametric EQ filters, limiting and alignment delay that eliminate the need for outboard loudspeaker processors. 

“Working with QSC and Q-SYS has been a great experience,” stated Kanaskie. “The Q-SYS software was easy to learn and intuitive to design and deploy; and because it is built on standard IT protocols, we were able to integrate it with our IT network. This helps simplify park-wide support for myself and our IT team.” Kanaskie concluded, “Our senior executives have been absolutely pleased with the Q-SYS installation, and now that our season is coming to a close, we are already discussing how we can expand the Q-SYS system into more areas of the park. It’s really broadened the scope of possibilities for our park!”