Owner Payam Arvin was looking for a “somatic full-body experience” for his guests at San Francisco’s Monroe nightclub, the latest incarnation in a legendary jazz space that hosted artists including Mingus, Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk in its days as the Jazz Workshop. Michael Lacina of JK Sound and Don Lynch of Commercial Audio Video Solutions deployed an array of d&b speakers and subs to get the desired effect. One of the most elaborate aspects is a custom subwoofer tower situated in a 13-foot-wide passage between the front bar and the dance floor. “There was absolutely no good place to install an omni-sub on the main dance floor,” Lacina explains, “and so the passage became the only logical location. However, the low frequencies from a subwoofer in that location would be very present in both sides of the club, so cardioid bass performance was needed. To keep up with the two V10 main dance floor speakers, we needed two subs to get the output we wanted. They had to be stacked to provide the widest passage for crowd flow. To maximize cardioid efficiency, they would have to be spaced one above the other.” This tower houses two XSLi-GSUB subwoofers with strategic air gaps to maximize their cardioid efficiency with minimized spill.
