The venue stages a mix of club nights and live performances. "There's something for everyone here," says Cargo's marketing manager Joe Roberts. "We want to appeal to all tastes, from your hard core clubber to those that want to have something to eat and then see a live band. We are now getting the bigger name, more experienced musicians in here, and they wanted a better monitoring system than we originally had. This has been part of the reason we upgraded our system. If you want the best, you need to have the right equipment."
Head of sound, Matt Smith, whilst acknowledging this need, goes one stage further in his assertion of the choice of system. "I've been here for six years and waited for three of those years for this [Aspect Wide] to be developed," he says. "I always stick with Turbosound, always have done."
The choice of Aspect Wide was, says Smith, dictated by the shape of the room. "The normal Aspect system wouldn't have done it, and I was advised to hang on for the new boxes." Four Aspect TA-500 units are suspended from the ceiling, one approaching each corner and instead of the seven bass bins that were there before, just three TSW-218s are required with the TQ-445s as in-fills and TFM-212s as stage monitoring.
"Compared with the other venues, the amount of stuff that was put in here six years ago meant it was quite high quality," continues Smith. "But everyone else seems to have developed their technical side a bit more recently, and I thought we needed to do that as well. Chris Greenwood, the musical director, has always been behind me and agreed with my decision.
"The difference it's made to the sound here is brilliant. It's crystal clear, a sound I haven't come across before. It can be very loud, but you can still have a conversation in the middle [of the dance floor]. I'm very pleased and we've had lots of positive feedback from customers, bands and promoters."
(Jim Evans)
