Having secured a major presence in the late night high street bar and club market over several decades, Middlesex Sound & Lighting (MSL) are showing no signs of letting up. For the past three years, they have been working with owner / operator Franco Lumbar, whose portfolio includes Club Essence in Kingston and the Pink gentleman’s club in Windsor; however the most significant has been the recent renovation of Club Vanilla, situated at Windsor’s Royal Arcade.
MSL project manager Bradley Watson says that wherever possible the audio distribution will be placed in a digital BSS Soundweb London environment to preserve signal fidelity and increase flexibility and processing power; Club Vanilla is no exception.
Club Vanilla had been operating from its subterranean site for a number of years before MSL were called in to overhaul the venue’s lighting and audio system.
Following a busy Christmas and New Year trading period, the venue closed its doors for a complete building transformation, which saw the interior opened up to create more space and provide new VIP booth seating areas, along with a new live sound stage and members bar area.
Bradley Watson set out to re-design the existing audio infrastructure and extend the network to cover the three zones, which include the expanded dancefloor space.
Elsewhere, a new BSS Soundweb London audio management system has been selected for the front end user interface, allowing the operators to seamlessly switch between the DJ and Live Sound inputs. Having EQ’d the venue using the Smaart Live audio analyzer, MSL head engineer Toby Jones has again designed a comprehensive sound file to allow for the varying applications within the Windsor club, offering a one touch solution for the venue staff.
To create a variable gain structure and allow routing of the signal source to the different zones he used a Harman Pro HiQnet-compatible Soundweb 12-in/8-out London BLU-100, with a pair of BLU-BOB2 breakout boxes, increasing the output possibilities to 24.
A London BLU-8 programmable wall controller and BLU-10 programmable touch interface provide local source select and volume control options, powered over Ethernet.
The Soundweb architecture, with three separate gain structures programmed using London Architect, provides the perfect flexible solution, believes Watson.
“We are specifying Soundweb wherever possible, and it’s the only DSP platform we use,” he continued. “Everything is reconfigurable, it has 96K sampling rate and is very fast, with zero latency. From an operator’s point of view even on a BLU3 you can have up to eight zones on separate inputs and outputs, written into the project file.
“Finally, everything can be networked and given an IP address, so we can remote into the system via an ASDL line and see fault codes and carry out healthchecks.
Underpinning this is the relationship MSL enjoys with the BSS UK and Ireland distributors, Sound Technology Ltd — and in particular the support they receive from Sound Technology’s Project Engineering Manager, Sam Brandon.
Thus the newly redesigned Vanilla is in safe hands — and will now seek to defend its reputation as being one of the top dance / club venues outside London. Having retained the loyal following that the venue has built, with the new sound system, layout and dedicated VIP and members areas, it will continue to rank highly within the Windsor late night venues of choice.
Related Links
