Harman solution for the Flea Bazaar Café
- Details
Owned and operated by Impresario Group, the 7,000sq.ft café features 13 separate restaurants, a marketplace for local lifestyle brands and a bar that serves local beers and craft cocktails. The Flea Bazaar Café also includes a community performance venue that hosts stand-up comedy, plays, DJs and live music, and more. The space features a customised pulley mechanism that can quickly lift the tables and chairs to the ceiling and create extra space for audiences, as well as a van that serves as the DJ booth.
Impresario Group hired long-time audio partner Munro Acoustics to design an audio system that would complement the aesthetic of the Flea Bazaar Café and deliver even sound coverage in the highly reverberant venue. Munro selected a complete Harman sound reinforcement system comprised of JBL VRX line array speakers, JBL SCS Spatially Cued Surround loudspeakers, Crown amplifiers and dbx digital signal processors.
“Integrating the system in a highly-morphable space such as Flea Bazaar Café was quite challenging,” says Kapil Thirwani, partner, Munro Acoustics. “We worked with the architects to make the subwoofers an integral part of the stage. The DJ plays through a van and we created a plug and play provision to disconnect the DJ van when not in use to free up the space for gigs.
“The venue was highly reverberant, and we faced some initial hiccups due to the complexity of the system design. However, the combination of the JBL VRX line array system and the JBL SCS loudspeakers worked well for this requirement. We chose HARMAN as our preferred audio solutions company for its wide range of JBL Professional loudspeakers, end-to-end solution offerings and their extensive service support network.”
The main house system includes six JBL VRX 932LA-1 compact line array speakers paired with four JBL VRX 918S 18” high power subwoofers, which are suspended from the venue ceiling. Two additional JBL VRX 918S cover the flea stall, kitchen garden and pan stall areas. Four JBL SCS 8 Spatially Cued Surround loudspeakers are used for side-fills around the main performance area, with six additional JBL SCS 8 installed at the flea stall, pan stall and kitchen garden area. The system is powered by Crown XTi 6002, MA 5000i and XLi 1500 amplifiers, which deliver reliable, uninterrupted power for performances.
“When I think of a bazaar, it brings back fond memories from my childhood,” says Prashant Govindan, Sr. Director India & SAARC, Harman Professional Solutions. “Street food, shopping and entertainment have been all brought together in this innovative yet modern setting. Although the installation was complex, the Harman Professional and Munro teams worked together to create a versatile audio experience.”
(Jim Evans)
