Written by Kent Learned, 26 February 2019, originally posted to the Wonderland History Facebook group.
One day management asked if we could put a system into the new Plaza Shop that was being made. They wanted to have about 5 different audio zones, including one that played songs that all had sweets or sugar or candy in their lyrics for the lolly shop they were putting in. There were 120 speakers mounted up in the ceiling.
One of the things they wanted was to be able to “Fly Sounds” around the room, like a plane flying overhead or a blowfly buzzing about. We made up a new plug-in version of the 24 volt amplifiers, that had 3 different audio inputs, one of which had a remote audio level control system, driven from a computer back in the sound room, one for whatever the soundtrack for that area was, and one for in-shop paging. Spod wrote all the software, and I made all the interface hardware for the computer part of the project.
We had an equipment room part way up the stairs that went to the general manager’s office from the shop. We had a large equipment rack up there, that had 60 of these amplifier cards in it, as well as the interface cards.
It all worked well in the end. Then management decided that the sounds flying around were distracting the customers from purchasing souvenirs etc., and we had to discontinue them. Not too long after that, the sales people in the lolly shop got well and truly fed up of the ~6 candy oriented songs and it was changed to something more generic.