The Stillery, a locally-owned restaurant started by veterans of Nashville’s culinary scene, offers Southern comfort food with a side of live music. The owners wanted to keep the food and the music intertwined without letting one overwhelm the other, so they turned to systems integrator South Central AV’s Nashville office.
South Central designed and installed a Bose sound system consisting of 16 RoomMatch loudspeakers in the upstairs portion of the restaurant arrayed as a live-music system, including three RoomMatch loudspeakers used as ceiling-hung monitors for performers and a Bose MB12 subwoofer under the stage. A second Bose system, consisting of four FreeSpace DS16 ceiling-mounted loudspeakers and two Panaray MB4 bass loudspeakers, covers the main dining floor, and plays audio from the two flat-screen televisions mounted above the bar or from the small solo singer-songwriter stage positioned there. Both systems share a 500- watt PowerMatch 8-channel amplifier, able to be split between the upstairs and downstairs sound systems; likewise a ControlSpace ESP- 00 processor, supports both floors and is used to route audio to any spot in the venue.
“We can send the music from the secondfloor stage to the dining room speakers, or we can take the sound from the performer by the downstairs bar and send it to the upstairs system,” explains Kevin Ezzell, regional account manager for South Central AV. Ezzell added that the Bose Modeler software was used to choose and position the speakers in each environment. “The Bose technology offered us the right speakers for each zone of the restaurant and the ability to route the audio from any stage to any level. That kind of flexibility is helping The Stillery compete in a very crowded restaurant and music-venue environment.”
Ezzell points out that the mixer for the upstairs main stage has a wireless iPad controller, allowing the restaurant manager to create separate mixes for each level and move between them to perfectly adjust the sound as capacity levels change during the day and night. “The routing abilities of ControlSpace and the fact that the PowerMatch amplifier can be discretely split means that these are two completely distinct sound systems, each exactly designed for the spaces that they’re used in, and that can trade the music between them.”
