LONDON — No. 5 Cavendish Square, formerly the Spanish Embassy with a more recent history of dining and clubbing, is a membership venue featuring an eight-room boutique hotel, a basement VIP lounge, main dance floor, and bar and lounge in the ground floor drawing room.
Installer Bernard Mani of Systems Etc., who had used Martin Audio gear at Pacha London and other venues, once again recommended a Martin Audio solution.
David Carvalho, the venue’s strategic and creative manager, and Suresh Gurung, bar manager, supported Mani’s recommendation, noting the brand’s popularity with DJs and calling it “the best British-made system on the market,” with “a great power to weight ratio.”
Mani chose Martin Audio’s AQ and Blackline systems for the upgrade. Upstairs, the front bar is served by four AQ8s with a floor-mounted AQ212 sub, and the adjacent room beefs up the sound with four AQ10s and an AQ215 sub, neatly situated in the ornate fireplace.
Downstairs, Mani opted for Blackline+, with four F10s mounted on standard yokes and flown around the VIP bar. A custom black AQ215 provides the low frequency extension. Two Blackline F10s are positioned over the main bar, which leads to the dance area. There, Mani complements the four Blackline F10s with a Martin Audio concert grade WS218X sub, which is floor-mounted next to the booth.
The venue’s six zones are accessed with a pair of Martin Audio Engineer 818 DSPs. With DJs playing both downstairs and upstairs six nights a week and background music providing the atmosphere at other times during the long trading cycle, the Engineer 818’s algorithms are vital to balance the input sources in terms of level and tonality.
Music is pumped into the different spaces either from an 8-Track Music Solutions server via the resident laptop or by other MP3 formats and CD.
With a mix of hip hop, house and electro, it was vital that both the DJ booth and loudspeaker specifications in this zone were high, and Carvalho said he was pleased with the result.
For more information, please visit www.martin-audio.com.
