Silver Dollar City Mystic River Falls

Herschend Family Entertainment Corporation (HFE) is the nation's largest family-owned theme attraction corporation. Their portfolio includes entertainment, tourism, and hospitality properties in 23 locations across six-states, including Silver Dollar City and the Showboat Branson Belle in Branson, Missouri, and Dollywood Theme Park in Pigeon Forge, TN. Paragon has been a long-standing partner of Herschend Family Entertainment. Paragon has provided technical and scenic elements for HFE as well as providing audio expertise for their large-scale attractions.

HFE's most recent large attraction is Mystic River Falls at Silver Dollar City. Mystic River Falls is the first of its kind in the world. It combines a more traditional raft-style ride with a vertical lift and a slide and drop element.

Paragon was hired to supply an audio system that could support the experience. Audio is an important element of the ride experience, delivering background music and special effects to create a themed experience from the queue line to ride completion. But the audio solution serves a much more comprehensive need. The solution must include paging capabilities so the ride operators can speak to the visitors and a life-safety element which means it has to be fail-safe.

Leveraging our decades of experience working with theme parks and attractions, the Paragon audio team delivered a sophisticated solution designed to create an immersive ride experience, while also meeting the technical needs of a large-scale attraction. The audio system includes themed BGM throughout queue lines, automated safety announcements throughout the attraction, and live zoned paging available to operators. As many as seven operators have direct zone paging capabilities for the areas within their responsibility, and the main dispatch operator has attraction-wide control for evacuation operations. Custom interface panels were designed to provide easy interaction with the system for each operator, and for maintenance operations. For life-safety the system relies on redundant networking coupled with redundant power sources and an analog failover. In addition to the ride itself, a new high-quality distributed BGM system was installed in the Rivertown Smokehouse restaurant seating areas where up to 450 guests have an excellent view of the ride. Paragon also designed a new area-wide BGM system for the entire Rivertown section of the park that leads up to the ride and restaurant attraction.

Silver Dollar City is all about the experience. Mystic River Falls is a unique ride that delivers a one-of-a-kind encounter. Paragon continues to partner with them to deliver AVL solutions that help deliver these unique experiences.