Occupying an old five-storey industrial building originally used as a clothing factory, the social enterprise Rich Mix originally opened with three cinema screens four and a half years ago, showing world cinema and first run movies.
But far from being purely an art house it started to run events in the bar - and under the supervision of director, Jane Earl, this is one of the activities that has taken off.
Technical manager Glenford Barnes had been far from happy with the previous sound system, the shortcomings of which were exacerbated by the highly reverberant concrete and glass box it found itself in. "We had issues with our speakers and needed to upgrade," he confirmed. "So we decided to go the whole way and change to an easier-to-operate live mixing desk at the same time."
Set with a fixed budget he started to make enquiries - and his search led him to Sound Technology, the Harman Pro distributors. "We needed a versatile system for speech reproduction - as we stage a lot of poetry and spoken word - as well as music. I've bought Harman equipment in the past and as soon as the system was demoed, I was sold."
Supply and installation was carried out by Southeastern Audio. Two pole-mounted JBL VRX932LAP 12" two-way powered line array loudspeakers atop a pair of VRX918SP front-loaded 18" powered subwoofers are situated stage left and stage right.
"The VRX line arrays give us much better coverage, eliminating the 'dead' area we had before. The top end was my concern and with the JBL's this is vastly improved. Especially now that we've added curtains and blocked off the mezzanine gallery space to deaden the room the system delivers not only the power but the clarity too."
As for the mixing desk, Glenford states, "We've had eight to 10 different engineers now working the Vi1 and all love it. Several had already trained on the larger Vi6 [Soundcraft's original Vi desk] so were instantly familiar with the Vi1's interface."
A single-wire Cat 5 infrastructure and newly constructed control booth, now situated right at the back of the room to offer better sightlines to stage, complete the fit-out.
(Jim Evans)
