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Music to Dine For

As music-themed restaurants and cafés proliferate, the bar gets raised for sound quality.

Music to Dine For

Feb 16, 2011 3:12 PM,
by Dan Daley

As music-themed restaurants and cafés proliferate, the bar gets raised for sound quality.

Technomedia recently installed a huge AV system at the Nashville Margaritaville Café. The Nashville location features three stages and a top-of-the-line custom system to accomodate the massive Nashville music scene.

If you’re going to theme your new café franchise on the music after a particular artist, and if you’re going to do it in Nashville—aka Music City—you know that the sound is going to have to be the first thing on the menu. It was for the latest edition of the Margaritaville Café chain, named for beach bum billionaire Jimmy Buffett (it could have been worse—they could have named it “Jimmy’s Buffet”) on Nashville’s boisterous and bustling lower Broadway nightlife strip. “The Nashville store was important for all of those reasons but also because Jimmy started his career there and several of his [Coral Reefer] band members live there, so you know it’s going to get scrutiny,” says Jeff Barnhart, design engineer and project manager for Technomedia, which did the AV systems installation and integration at that location. (This was Technomedia’s first Margaritaville location but it’s a sector veteran, having worked on many of the Hard Rock Café restaurants in the U.S.)

Music-themed restaurants have been a cyclical staple of the food and beverage business for decades, starting with the venerable Hard Rock Café and House of Blues brands. But they’ve taken off in recent years. According to Darren Tristano, executive vice president of Technomic—a market research company that tracks the restaurant industry—these types of establishments have been “showing more unit growth” in the last several years, particularly new brands like country singer Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar, which is named for one of his hit songs.

Technomedia installed the new AV systems at the Nashville Margaritaville.

The Nashville Margaritaville location, the tenth in the chain so far, is somewhat different from its siblings, which tend to have a house band stage on the main floor and small solo/duo stage near the entrance. In Nashville, the company included those, but the restaurant also tipped its hat to Nashville’s massive music performance base and created a concert stage on the building’s second floor in a space that can hold up to 400 patrons. Technomedia installed a JBL PA system comprised of a pair of VP7212/64DP powered 10in. two-way integrated loudspeakers flown above the curved stage at the front of the restaurant with a pair of VPSB7118DP subwoofers nestled below the stage. Two VP7219/95DP powered delay speakers cover the rear of the room while JBL VP7212MDP powered monitors keep the band alert on stage. The club’s house band stage on the main floor also has JBL components—the same main enclosures as upstairs but with smaller VRX918SP subs, all flown 9ft. above the stage and aimed downward at 35 degrees to optimize throw and coverage. “We picked enclosures with tight dispersion patterns and chose the angle in order to be able to keep it pretty loud but not rip the heads off the people sitting closest to the stage,” Barnhart explains. Both stages are mixed through YamahaLS9-32 digital mixers. The solo performer stage near the entrance uses a JBL portable EON PA system and a Behringer Xenyx 1202 analog mixer on the stage.

“This location is set apart by the fact that it’s intended to be used as a showcase venue for record labels and artists,” Barnhart explains. “It’s going to be the most demanding venue in terms of sound for that reason.”

The distributed audio system is no slouch, either. Klipsch provided 29 KI-102BT speakers, 18 IC-650-T in-ceiling speakers, 31 RW5101in-ceiling subs, and a pair of CA-800T subwoofers for the background music/paging systems that covers both store levels. In all 103 speakers are used to distribute audio from a variety of sources, including Sirius XM satellite radio (Buffett has his own channel on the network) and a Promo Only Muse video server that’s loaded with music videos from Coral Reefer alumni including Sheryl Crow and Mac MacAnally; music from any of the three stages can also be routed through the eight-zone distributed audio system, which uses MediaMatrix N series DSP.

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Music to Dine For

Feb 16, 2011 3:12 PM,
by Dan Daley

As music-themed restaurants and cafés proliferate, the bar gets raised for sound quality.

Barnhart points out that the sound install was so critical that Klipsch engineers Roy Delgado and Greg Topp modified the KI-102BT speakers, adjusting them to fit inside the ceilings and for the response curve of the room. “That’s not something you see everyday,” he says.

The system installation was not without challenges. The building is part of Nashville’s landmarked downtown historical district, which limits the scope of alterations that can be done. That meant pulling wire through old walls where necessary, though much of the wiring runs in free air along the ceilings. The decorative scenery was also a challenge at times, with thatched hut roofs and tin ceilings limiting the use of in-ceiling speakers in parts of the distributed audio system and necessitating the use of surface-mounted speakers on walls and beams. “The goal was to have no hotspots whatsoever, just a very smooth, good-sounding sound system throughout the restaurant,” says Barnhart. Another part of achieving that was bringing in Steve Sockey and Adam Schulman from SIA Acoustics, who used the EASE program to model the room prior to systems installation to determine the best speaker locations and optimal processing.

The biggest acoustical issue, however, was the fact that one of the walls of the upstairs music venue adjoins a residential building next door. In order to minimize sound transmission between them, the room-within-a-room construction technique was applied: the venue floor was floated and the ceiling decoupled, and a second staggered-stud wall was constructed to mechanically decouple the vertical walls of each structure. The design process for that took as long as four months, says Barnhart, to reassure residents and inspectors that it would work. In addition, the rear wall of the stage was treated with absorptive material to eliminate slap-back reflections into the room, and the tin roofs of the faux shacks on the main floor have a thin layer of absorptive material between two layers of corrugated metal to dampen resonance.

Margaritaville Nashville also has portable digital signage. Because landmark status meant nothing could be affixed to the side of the building, so Technomedia had the McBride Company fabricate custom stands for a pair of Sunbrite3220HD plasma displays that show menus and entertainment schedules for the evening, with power and content coming through wall plates under weatherproof covers with Extron VGA-over-Cat-5 extenders. The signage is taken in every night. And most whimsical is the Big-type musical spiral staircase between levels that plays sampled piano scales as patrons move along the steps. Audio comes through five MeyerMM4 XPpowered speakers that line the staircase, each in its own zone so you only hear the notes on steps closest to you.

“That’s a fun effect,” Barnhart says, “but Margaritaville as a music venue in Nashville is very serious.”

The PBR Rock Bar, the newest addition to the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas, was a challenge for integrator R2W. Since floor space is rare in Las Vegas, and usually reserved for tables, the entire 46,000W system is surface-mounted.

That’s no Bull

Anyone who remembers the film Urban Cowboy knows that Gilley’s roadhouse has spawned several generations of music bars. The 1,100-capacity PBR Rock Bar, the newest addition to the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas and licensed by the Professional Bullriders Association, upholds that tradition—including a mechanical bull—but does it with Vegas-style panache. The long and narrow restaurant means a premium on floor space for tables, so the house’s blunt-force 46,000W sound system is all surface mounted, including 21 JBL AM7212/95 12in. full-range two-way loudspeakers and five JBL ASB6125 high-power dual subwoofers, all powered by seven Lab.gruppenC 28:4 and two C48:4 4-channel amplifiers and a Lab.gruppen NLB 60E NomadLink Bridge & Network controller for amplifier monitoring and control. David Starck, director of engineering and the systems engineer on the PBR project for integrator R2W, says the challenge was creating a distributed sound system that had essentially music PA-system reproduction capability, whether for the often-incredibly loud music pumped into the room from a Windows Media Player or from the nightly live DJ or periodic live music appearances. “The system really has to thump—that’s the market they’re going for,” he says. “The speakers all had to be off the floor, including the subs, so we had to choose components that would be able to handle that kind of power but also play back well without being stacked or flown.”

The speaker enclosures are mounted to the walls very close to the ceilings, using JBL MTU-3 U-bracket mounts, in order to take advantage of the room’s amplification effect and avoid reflections. The subs are mounted facing down the center of the room for even LF dispersion. Audio is filled where needed by eight JBL AC28/26 2-way loudspeakers and four JBL Control 24CT two-way ceiling speakers for the 13,000 square-foot dining/bar area, along with 15 JBL Control 28T-60 high-output speakers for the 3,000-square foot outdoor patio area. To take full advantage of the system’s power, Starck wired each speaker to an individual amplifier output. “That way, each speaker has its own channel, and you really maximize the system’s performance,” he says. System control is via BSS Soundweb LondonBLU-160 DSP, BLU-120 networked signal processor, and BLU-8 programmable zone controller for the club’s four audio zones.

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Music to Dine For

Feb 16, 2011 3:12 PM,
by Dan Daley

As music-themed restaurants and cafés proliferate, the bar gets raised for sound quality.

Since the PBR Rock Bar is on Las Vegas’ Miracle Mile, it has several large-screen televisions and powerful speakers in its 3,000-square foot patio area to compete with neighboring businesses. Each speaker is wired to its own amplifier, maximizing the system’s performance.

While distributing such a powerful system had its own challenges, Las Vegas has some unique ones as well. Half of PBR’s bar faces out into the Miracle Mile mall complex, where it’s next to a high-end candy store and across from one of the Planet Hollywood’s casino entrances—all of which have their own external speakers roaring to attract patrons. PBR’s bar fires back with a pair of AC24s. “That’s the other reason it’s good to have a really powerful sound system,” Starck says. “That’s a battle we can win.”

Music-themed restaurants and café’s might get a boost from a nascent trend toward higher quality music sources, such as the new Pro-Codec plug-in from MP3 developer Fraunhofer Institute that debuted at CES this year. Applicable to a much wider range of codecs—including MP3 Surround, MP3 HD, AAC-LC, and HE-AAC and HD-AAC—it signals a pushback against the highly compressed sound that has shaped the public’s perception of music for the past decade.

“Improved audio from these kinds of installations are driving up the bar for all kinds of restaurant sound systems,” Barnhart says. “It’s making the transition from music venue to restaurant increasingly seamless.”

“Bar owners used to put the financial emphasis on the kitchen and bar, but now they’re paying more attention to the sound systems than ever before, and not just lounges,” Starck says. “Sound has become as important as video in attracting people into a restaurant, and since it projects further than video, they see it as very effective.”

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