Escape Hunt Experience, Oxford

Escape Hunt Experience is a fantastic global entertainment franchise offering unique “escape the room” adventures to the public and corporate clients all over the world. It all started in July 2013 when they opened the doors of their first branch in Bangkok, which to this day attracts thousands of visitors and raves reviews on TripAdvisor. Their success spread around the world to the point where they are now the acknowledged global leader in this fast-growing indoor entertainment industry. This global support, amazing customer service and the only escape game design academy in the world are the key components to their continued success alongside, of course, the skill and dedication of each local franchise partner.

Midall & Stones of Chesterfield who undertake the electrical fitouts at the UK venues approached Monacor for a solution that would provide their client with an audio system that would allow several Games Masters to listen in on multiple games rooms and communicate back to the competitors, offer clues to their quest to solve the puzzles and exit the rooms.

They needed a system that would reduce the level of hardware at each Games Masters station and was also user friendly. This setup had to allow them to listen in on two rooms and have a single microphone to make announcements back to the chosen games room.

Monacor’s Commercial Audio department relished this opportunity to incorporate the ARM-880 Matrix Mixer, paging microphone and wall plates along with a multichannel amplifier and loudspeakers. Each Games Master console consisted of an ARM-880 paging microphone, ARM-880WP2 wall plates and headphones connected to an audio output plate. This allowed the operator to select which room they listened to via the source selection feature of the wall plate and also make announcements to the relevant games room with the zoned paging microphone. A second listening point was also installed to allow trainees to listen in on the rooms. A total of three Games Master stations are installed at each venue.

To keep hardware down to a minimum at the consoles, the above hardware was cabled back to a Comms rack that housed the ARM-880 matrix mixers. The matrix mixer and paging microphone solution was then complimented with a Monacor PA-1850D multi-channel amplifier and several EUL-60/SW surface mount loudspeakers which gave great speech and music reproduction.