Founded in 2012, South Wales’ Tiny Rebel microbrewery has earned recognition not just for award-winning beers, but also for bars and kitchens that serve a wide range of food, and host regular events including live music. With three sites – the first in Cardiff town centre, another in the centre of Newport and most recently a flagship Brewery Bar in Rogerstone, Newport. And it is here that the company has opened a bespoke £2.6m brewing facility, calling on Spartan Audio to oversee it's a/V needs.

Working with UK distributor CUK Audio, Spartan has completed a refit of the Cardiff venue with a similar Symetrix/Dante/Powersoft backbone to that employed in Rogerstone. ‘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,’ says Spartan Audio’s Dave Morgan.

From the outset, the A/V concept was for the system to be both scalable and future-proof. ‘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,’ Morgan explains. ‘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 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 Cat7 tielines 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 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.

‘This machine provides us with remote access to support any last-minute event-specific configuration,’ Morgan says. ‘It also allows gives us very quick access to troubleshoot the system for the client should that be required, which give us both peace of mind.’

The Cardiff bar along has been upgraded 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 A/V functions.

‘We decided on a Radius for the Cardiff bar rather than Prism because Radius has an expansion slot that we may need to use for future upgrades,’ Morgan says. ‘We didn’t need that capacity for the Brewery bar because it was a new build and so the Dante network infrastructure was properly anticipated and built into the fabric of the building. If ever we need to interface with any other protocols, we can simply add an appropriate Dante bridge. However, as the Cardiff bar was a refit with limited cable access, it’s not quite as simple to provide Dante access points where we need them, so the option to expand capacity with more analogue and/or AES I/O is really useful.’

‘Personally, this has been one of my favourite projects of all time,’ he adds. ‘I’m proud of the systems we’ve provided – they look good, they sound even better, and they respond in every way to the client’s demand that they be scalable and futureproof. We’ve had unfailing support from CUK [Powersoft and Symetrix distributor] throughout the duration of the project and we know they’ll be there for us in the future should we require it. And then there’s the beer – what’s not to like?’