Background music, both live and pre-recorded, sets the mood in the building's different areas; the Champagne Bar, Brasserie and Pudding Bar on the ground floor and the Apartment Bar on the first floor. A well-distributed, easy to control sound system was required and Kettner's management also wanted facilities for three media rooms on the first floor.
These are being hired out to corporate clients and local film and post-companies for presentations and receptions. Each media room contains a sound system that includes a pair of K-Array KT20 loudspeakers accompanied by a KKS50 subwoofer.
The K-Arrays are controlled locally by a Crestron MT000 wireless touch screen processor but can be run on a wider scale from the Ateis UAP G2. Kettner's is the first UK installation for the UAP G2, which was supplied through Ateis' distributor, HD Pro Audio.
Robert Knowles of installation company All Options reports that Kettner's wanted a system that was cost-effective and simple to operate. "A switcher-controlled matrix is one approach," he says, "but that can be expensive to install and complicated to run with touch screens. A simpler and less costly way is to have easy to operate wall panels, with the matrix hidden away in a rack. The Ateis is the easier way to do this."
Two Ateis racks control all three floors. By using a selector on the wall panels, background music licensed from Image Sound or the output of the Sennheiser Evolution G2 wireless microphone in the Apartment Bar can be switched to any part of the building, which is fitted with a mixture of Tannoy ceiling loudspeakers and further K-Array KT20/KKS50 combinations.
Through the UAP G2's switching capability the K-Arrays in the media rooms can also relay either background music or performances in the Apartment Bar. In return what is heard in the media areas can be broadcast over the rest of the building. Kettner's has been fitted with Cat 5E cable arranged in rings, connecting the Ateis and Crestron processors using the RS232 protocol. The two systems can work independent of each other or be networked in this way.
(Jim Evans)
