Planning an event at the Gas South Convention Center? Atlanta Music Pros can help coordinate audio, video, lighting, entertainment and production requirements, subject to the venue’s policies and vendor requirements. For events at the Gas South Convention Center we can provide or coordinate exhibit hall and ballroom audio, wireless microphones, general session production, IMAG and multi-camera video, projection and LED, breakout room AV, live streaming, stage lighting, staging and corporate entertainment — working within the facility’s own vendor and service requirements.
The Gas South Convention Center is the anchor of the Gas South District at 6400 Sugarloaf Parkway in Duluth, on a campus it shares with Gas South Arena, Gas South Theater and the Hudgens Center for Art & Learning. The facility hosts trade shows, conventions, banquets, meetings, conferences, performances and sporting events.
For the large share of metro corporate business that sits north and east of the city — Duluth, Suwanee, Lawrenceville, Buford, Johns Creek, Alpharetta, Peachtree Corners — it is the practical large-event venue. Attendees avoid the drive into Downtown, parking is straightforward, and the campus can absorb a program that outgrows a hotel ballroom.
The facility carries exhibit halls, a ballroom and meeting rooms, and each of those is a different production problem at the same guest count — so the space assignment drives the design.
Speech first.
Seeing the stage and keeping the content.
Content people can read.
Making the stage look intentional.
Someone owning the show.
The half most AV companies do not provide.
Because the campus spans a convention center, an arena and a theater, the range of event shapes here is unusually wide.
Ballroom main-room production with PA, presentation management, IMAG and show calling. See general session production.
General session plus concurrent meeting rooms run as one production. See conference AV.
Exhibitor booth audio, displays, demo microphones and session room production. See trade show AV.
Ballroom dinners with award playback, IMAG, lighting, an MC and an after-party. See awards gala production.
Company-wide meetings for north-metro employers, with speech-first audio and recording. See corporate meeting AV.
Launches and dealer meetings using hall or ballroom space with LED or projection. See product launch production.
Five things worth working out before you order anything here.
The district publishes materials for planners and exhibitors covering how services are ordered and what the facility requires. It also lists named vendors for the campus, including catering, audiovisual and convention services. What those listings mean for your specific event — whether a named vendor’s use is required, optional or subject to a fee — is set by the facility and your license agreement, and we would rather you confirm it than take our word for it.
An exhibit hall, the ballroom and a meeting room behave very differently. Hall speech needs distributed coverage because a high hard ceiling reflects sound, and reverberation, not volume, is what defeats intelligibility. The ballroom is a much more forgiving room. Meeting rooms are straightforward. The same 400 people in each of those spaces needs three different audio designs.
As in every ballroom, house lighting comes straight down and shadows presenters’ eyes. It looks mildly unflattering in the room and clearly amateur on a screen or a recording. Front key light across the presenter area is the highest-value, lowest-cost addition to a general session here, and it improves IMAG and any recording at the same time.
Electrical circuits for a lighting or LED build and wired internet for a stream are typically separate paid orders with advance deadlines and higher on-site rates. Livestreamed sessions in particular need dedicated connectivity specified early enough to land in time.
An arena event, a theater performance or a concurrent show affects parking, load-in routes and dock scheduling even when it does not touch your space. It is a five-minute question that occasionally saves a lot of load-in time. Venue policies, outside-vendor requirements, power, internet, loading access and production restrictions should be confirmed with the venue during pre-production. Many hotels, arenas and convention facilities maintain in-house AV departments, exclusive service providers, union labor rules, rigging approvals and outside-vendor fees, and those terms decide what any outside company can do in the room.
The campus offers genuinely different kinds of room. Choosing the right one saves more money than any AV decision downstream of it.
| If your event is | The production consideration |
|---|---|
| A seated banquet or gala | Ballroom — forgiving acoustics, straightforward staging, IMAG worth considering at depth |
| A general session with slides | Ballroom — front key light and a properly sized screen matter more than PA size |
| A trade show or expo | Exhibit hall — distributed booth audio, displays over projection, and show sound-level rules |
| A multi-track conference | Ballroom plus meeting rooms — one frequency plan and one presentation process across all of it |
| A large-audience session | Hall or arena space — distributed coverage and IMAG become requirements rather than upgrades |
| A performance-led program | Theater space — existing systems and house requirements should be confirmed before planning an outside build |
A large share of Metro Atlanta’s corporate employment sits along the I-85 and Peachtree Industrial corridor, and for those companies the calculus on venue choice is different from a Downtown-based organization’s.
An all-hands meeting or dealer event held in Duluth saves a few hundred attendees a drive into the city and back, which is real time and real goodwill. Parking is straightforward rather than a paid garage exercise. Load-in for production is generally simpler than in a Downtown tower with a single freight elevator. And for programs where attendees are local rather than flying in, there is no hotel-adjacency argument pulling you Downtown in the first place.
The tradeoff is fewer walkable hotels and restaurants than the convention district offers, which matters for multi-day programs with out-of-town attendees and matters very little for a one-day internal event. We work across both, and we will tell you honestly which side of that tradeoff your program sits on. Our venue directory covers the Downtown options alongside this one.
An illustrative configuration for a north-metro employer running a one-day company meeting with afternoon breakouts. This is a hypothetical illustration of how a production of this shape fits together. It is not a past project, not a quote and not a price.
At 400 people in a ballroom, IMAG and front key light are the two additions that change the audience experience most. A larger PA does not fix a presenter the back of the room cannot see clearly.
This page exists because planners search for AV help by venue. It does not indicate any affiliation, endorsement, partnership, preferred-vendor status or approved-vendor status, and we make no claim to any. the Gas South Convention Center is named here only to describe the kind of production planning an event in that building involves.
Whether an outside production company can work in a given space, and on what terms, is decided by the venue and by your own contract with it. We will work within those terms, and we will tell you plainly when something you have asked for is not ours to promise.
Atlanta Music Pros is an Atlanta-based company covering Metro Atlanta and North Georgia. We travel to the venue rather than operating suburban offices.
We can provide or coordinate exhibit hall and ballroom audio, microphones, general session production, IMAG, projection or LED, breakout AV, streaming, lighting, staging and entertainment for events there, working within the facility’s vendor and service requirements. The district publishes policies for event planners and an exhibitor guide, and those documents plus your license agreement determine what an outside company may supply and install.
The district lists named vendors for the campus, including catering, audiovisual and convention services. What that means for your specific event — whether use is required, optional, or subject to a fee — is set by the facility and your license agreement rather than by us, and it can differ between an exhibitor and a client licensing space. Confirm it with the facility during scoping; we will scope to whatever the answer is.
Because for a workforce along the I-85 and Peachtree Industrial corridor it saves several hundred people a drive into the city and back, parking is straightforward, and load-in is generally simpler than a Downtown tower with one freight elevator. The tradeoff is fewer walkable hotels and restaurants, which matters for multi-day programs with out-of-town attendees and very little for a one-day internal event.
A hall has a high hard ceiling that reflects sound, and the resulting reverberation is what destroys speech intelligibility — turning up makes it worse, because the reflections get louder too. Halls need distributed coverage: more speakers placed closer to the audience, each working less hard. The ballroom is a considerably more forgiving room, so your space assignment drives the design more than the headcount.
It depends on room depth and guest count. Once the back rows are far enough away that a presenter’s expression is no longer readable, camera magnification is what puts those people back in the room. For several hundred people in a ballroom it usually earns its cost, and it pairs with front key light — magnifying a poorly lit presenter onto a large screen makes the lighting problem more visible, not less.
Yes, with dedicated wired internet ordered through the facility. Shared or public wireless is not a reasonable basis for a live stream. For internal all-hands meetings we would typically encode the program feed to a private destination, with the stream mix built separately from the room mix so remote employees hear a clean feed rather than room ambience and reflections.
It can affect parking, load-in routes and dock scheduling even when it does not touch your space. Asking the facility what else is on the campus that week takes five minutes and occasionally saves a substantial amount of load-in time, particularly for productions with a lot of equipment. It is one of the more useful questions specific to a multi-venue campus.
Yes, on one contract. The same team can run the general session and breakouts during the day and then the banquet program, award presentation and after-party in the evening with an MC, DJ or live band. For north-metro corporate events that combination is common, and it removes the vendor handoff at the point where the room is most likely to lose energy.
Tell us which space you have been assigned, the guest count and the program shape. For this facility we will also want to know what the district requires you to order through its own services.