The interior creation of this £1 million project was entrusted to Siberian designer, Valentina Druzhinina. Each of the rooms is delineated by different chandeliers and a different colour scheme - white for the Cocktail Bar, a warmer brown for the Champagne Bar and black granite and black marble in the main room, with textured black Ulf Moritz wallpaper and curtains.
For their audio requirements, the club contacted residential/home theatre specialists Audio Venue, who were already known to one of the directors, and they in turn sub-contracted builders Goodways. Audio Venue director Saj Afzal, says that having equipped the Cocktail and Champagne lounges with a residential solution, his company sought advice from Shure Distribution UK when it came to the main commercial room, where the DJ booth and percussion platform are housed.
Shure Distribution UK's John Perry, and applications and project support sales manager Tuomo Tolonen, recommended four QSC ModularDesign MD-F152/64r enclosures - two clustered each side of the room, to provide 120° of dispersion - with a pair of MD-S218 woofers pumping out the sub-frequencies from some of the capital's top DJ's. While the mid-highs are assigned to a pair of QSC RMX5050 amplifiers (run in parallel), QSC RMX4050HD amplifiers, operating in bridged mono, drive the subwoofers.
Both the turntablists and the percussionist, perched high over the main dancefloor, have been given a pair of QSC AD-S282H enclosures for their monitor sound, powered by a pair of QSC RMX2450's run in stereo.
The sound systems in the other lounges are also powered by six QSC's RMX850 (three per room), while all control is provided through QSC's DSP322ua processing device, which handles the different gain structures and routes the music to all three zones. Source and volume select are operable manually from the QSC WCP-1 and WCP-2 wall controls.
All the QSC equipment, including a highly-specified DJ booth featuring Technics SL1210 turntables, Pioneer CDJ-1000 CD turntables and Allen & Heath XONE:464 mixer, was installed by Stagecraft, under the overall project management of Audio Venue.
The club's general manager Alex Nicholl says that the sound system had been a huge success since New York DJ Erick Morillo arrived for the opening night party, officially inaugurating the club with his unique brand of progressive house music. "We used DJ's to help spec the sound booth, and without a great sound system we could never have attracted someone of Erick Morillo's calibre," says Nicholls, whose career has been spent in top-end nightclubs. "Now everyone wants to come down and play."
(Jim Evans)
