Berenice International Airport is located in the city of Berenice, 160 km south of Marsa Alam City.

The airport is of great importance, as this region is a very popular tourist destination due to its unique location on the Red Sea coast.

Both the Terminal Building (130 meters long and 60 meters wide) and the Mosque Building (35 meters long and 25 meters wide) are equipped with TOA Public Address and Voice Evacuation Systems. It was also decided to install an interface between the TOA VX-3000 Series system (Public Address and Voice Evacuation) and the AviaVox AVX-8 speech synthesizer (Automatic Voice Announcement System).

Due to its very high ceilings (around 9 meters) and the interior finishes with very low absorption coefficients, the Terminal Building is considered a space with a high level of acoustic difficulty. (For the acoustics experts: at the start of the acoustic planning, the reverberation time (RT) of the Terminal Building —at 1 kHz— exceeded 7 seconds. Thanks to a change in the building materials, TOA’s partner TECO was able to reduce the RT to 2.03 seconds.)

TECO was responsible for the low current systems, selecting and verifying the types and distribution of loudspeakers using the EASE acoustic simulation software, confirming the relevant acoustic indices (STI, ALCONS, and SPL) required for airport projects. Other tasks included supplying, installing, programming, testing, and commissioning the Public Address and Voice Evacuation Systems, as well as ensuring that the measured acoustic indices met international airport requirements, taking into account the European EN 54 standard when selecting the voice alarm system.

The main function of the system is the broadcasting of voice announcements. For this reason, it was integrated with the AviaVox Automatic Voice Announcement System (AVAS), focusing the acoustic requirements primarily on speech intelligibility. The aim was to deliver airport announcements with a high level of natural speech in both English and Egyptian Arabic.

To complete the installation of the integrated system, TECO and Collins Aerospace, who were responsible for setting up the AviaVox system, worked closely together. In addition, the installed system also covers background music, general paging, recorded announcements, and pre-recorded evacuation messages. The types and quantities of loudspeakers (SR-H3S/H2S) were chosen based on Electro-Acoustic Simulation Reports. The passive line array speakers provided a very good, stable, and robust solution for both the Terminal Building and the Mosque Building.

TECO chose to use TOA products in the airport buildings for the acoustic system because they knew these products would meet all the project requirements. By choosing TOA, they ensured that the system itself would not add complications to an already challenging project and were thus able to meet the deadlines and deliver the project as planned.