You wouldn’t think of a building as having a central nervous system - but deep in the interior of the new Waikato Regional Theatre there is a special room that will be exactly that.
It’s a hub where the theatre’s peripheral nerves - the 30 kilometres of glass fibre optic cables that flow throughout the entire structure - meet and connect, carrying audio, video, paging, and other forms of raw data from the main auditorium to all other parts of building.
The $80 million theatre is undoubtedly the most advanced such building to be constructed in New Zealand for decades and the sound system, once completed, will be the equal of any such facility anywhere in the world.
“For a building built around sound and vision, this is the heart of it,” said Mike Orum, one of the eight data technicians who are charged with the task of ensuring that every last strand of cable is correctly connected to each of about 600 termination points in 205 different locations.
Right now, it looks like a spaghetti factory.
And unravelling the strands are two local firms - Structured Technologies and Feisst Electrical.
“It’s cool it’s being done by all Hamilton companies,” said Orum. “There’s not busloads of labour being brought in from somewhere else.”
