LEA amps support themed restaurant
- Details
Chef Adrianne took over and completely renovated an existing 8,000sq.ft restaurant space. The new space features a large indoor dining area, two private dining rooms, and a social-distance-friendly terrace outfitted with a large retractable projection screen and other AV tools throughout to accommodate special events. The new space has been designed with a warm, modern, Napa Valley wine country décor featuring tall ceilings and wide-open spaces. It can accommodate 270 patrons - a sizable jump from the old location's capacity of 60.
With audio support playing an essential part of the restaurant experience, Calvo turned to audio expert Ivan Sotomayor, president, and owner of ISF Enterprises, a south Florida-based audio and AV integration firm that focuses on restaurant, club, retail, and multi-use facilities.
“This installation was fun but also a bit challenging,” said Sotomayor. “There are multiple indoor audio zones we need to control, and outdoors, the facility is next to a waterway, so we needed an appropriate volume level and control for optimum sound quality and intelligibility for music as well as presentations - and they even needed surround-sound capabilities outdoors.”
Sotomayor explained that the team used a programme called Ease to help map out the number, size, and speakers' locations to best cover the facility.
“A restaurant of this size can use a lot of audio zones, requiring many separate audio feeds,” added Sotomayor. “They even have separate audio zones in the entrance area where patrons wait for seating, and we added sound to the kitchen and chef area back of house.”
Ultimately, the sound system required 10 audio zones to cover the restaurant appropriately. The team selected three Connect 354 IoT-enabled amplifiers from LEA Professional to power the system. Suited for small to medium scale installations, these two, four, and eight-channel amps feature direct HiZ (70V or 100V) or LoZ selectable by channel.
“The three LEA amps give us 12 channels of power, so we have a little growing room. We're using a 70-volt system over the entire place with Sonance speakers throughout, and it's worked out nicely," said Sotomayor. “We were recommended the LEA amps, I had not worked with them before, but now that we've had a chance to hear them and see how they operate, we use the DSP to really make the sound perfect in each of the individual zones. They are great amps that I will use for more installations for sure.”
Like any new system, the team is learning and adjusting, and a key capability of the LEA Professional amplifiers is the cloud connectivity. Sotomayor and his team are looking forward to fully working with the amplifiers' connectivity to be able to troubleshoot or tweak system parameters remotely, any time needed.
