Spartan Audio & CUK deliver AV for Tiny Rebel
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The company currently boasts three sites: the first in Cardiff town centre just across from the Principality Stadium; another in the centre of Newport; and finally, the flagship Brewery Bar in Rogerstone, Newport, which is part of a brand new bespoke brewing facility that has increased capacity five-fold.
The company officially cut the ribbon on the new £2.6m premises in July 2017. Their AV partner throughout the build was Spartan Audio who are supplied by UK distributors, CUK Audio. In addition to the AV installation in the new Brewery Bar, Spartan Audio has just completed a refit of the Cardiff venue with a similar Symetrix/Dante/Powersoft backbone.
Spartan Audio’s Dave Morgan explained that the AV concept from the outset was built around the idea that the system had to be both scalable and future-proof. “The Brewery is the HQ of a brand that is expanding at the speed of light, so any system that we installed needed to be able to keep pace accordingly,” he said. There are four main zones to be covered; the bar, the dining area, a large sun terrace and the brewery production area itself which hosts tours at the weekend. The space is designed to accommodate a wide variety of events from live music and dance events, to awards shows, Super Bowl screenings and more.
“The client specifically requested a Void Acoustics speaker system,” explained Morgan, “but the rest was up to us, and we very quickly settled on a combination of Symetrix DSP and Powersoft Dante-networked amplifiers to handle all of the work under the hood. The resulting Dante backbone is built on the ever-expandable and malleable Symetrix Prism DSP platform combined with Powersoft’s Quattrocanali DSP + Dante amplifiers.
“Numerous patchable Cat 7 tie lines distributed throughout the various spaces can be configured for Dante, Video over IP or other network traffic including control data. AES, analogue audio or DMX can also be patched as required by our technicians for special events.”
Spartan installed a single Symetrix Arc-3 wall panel behind the bar to handle all of the user-operated functions, including the triggering of RS485 commands sent over TCP/IP to the video system, from the Symetrix Prism. The system rack is home to a Windows PC with both Symetrix Composer and Powersoft Armonia installed, which are the software programs used to provide configuration, remote control and monitoring for Prism and Quattrocanali respectively. “
Spartan Audio has also recently upgraded the audio elements in the Cardiff bar along much the same lines, including a live music area upstairs in the Beer Hall, a system in the main bar, a system in the upstairs bar and in their dedicated Cwtch bar. At the heart of the control system this time is a Symetrix Radius DSP platform with two Windows touchscreen tablets (one on each floor) running Symetrix’s SymVue control application to control each floor’s respective AV functions.
(Jim Evans)
