With city views, spa and sumptuous suites with firepits, Edinburgh’s W Hotel is the latest in the Marriott International ‘W’ international hotel chain. ‘Sound is a big thing with the W brand,’ says W Edinburgh IT Manager, Kevin Edwards. ‘It’s one of our key components of the brand makeup, and therefore getting the sound right is incredibly important.’
On top of the building’s steel-spiral-clad exterior is a rooftop terrace served by a multi-speaker sound system from Italian audio manufacturer K-array, installed by London-based Link Media Systems.
‘We had around 200 guests up here enjoying sundowners at a premier opening party with a live act and the sound was incredible,’ Edwards says. ‘The coverage is really well focused, delivers plenty of energy and creates a real party mood. We’ve got to be conscious of the neighbours, but up here on the 12th floor the sound is well contained and doesn’t spill – we’ve had the volume pretty high without any issues, and the K-array speakers are more than capable. The sound quality is excellent; it’s crystal clear’.
The Link Media technical team sound design floods the terrace area with high level sound while remaining extremely discreet, while also being protected from the often harsh weather conditions thanks to their stainless steel construction.
‘We realised straight away that we couldn’t just install a conventional sound system and hope for the best,’ explains Link Media Systems Project Manager, Eligio Castro. ‘Not only is the terrace a big open space that requires fairly high SPL, but the speakers had to be unobtrusive and aimed carefully to contain sound energy within the space.’
That brief presented some acoustic challenges as the setting is open to the elements and the inner-city property is surrounded by neighbours. Link Media’s solution was to install 43 evenly spaced Vyper-KV52 0.5m-long line arrays facing inwards from the perimeter of the terrace, each one inlaid among the custom designed Rimex copper coloured cladding that helps underpin the W’s architectural style, and at a uniform height that works well with the low profile lazy boy seating.
Low end is provided by 16 Rumble-KU210 dual 10-inch subwoofers, positioned around the central core of the building, partially hidden above head height underneath the steel spiral ribbon that defines the hotel’s modernistic architectural signature.
The terrace sound system is powered over Dante by Kommander-KA104 amplifiers with onboard DSP located in a central equipment room that also houses BSS Soundweb signal processing. Crestron provides the user interface to give staff access to the system control and audio inputs.
Downstairs on the ground floor, linking the main reception area with a further themed seating space, is the Cinematic Tunnel – a 10m-long space with plush banquette seating opposite a high-resolution video display. At either end of the giant screen are vertically-orientated Vyper-KV52 line arrays, which blend in imperceptibly with the display, and a pair of Rumble-KU44 subwoofers installed under the seating for low frequency reinforcement. Additional Vyper-KV52 line arrays are concealed in alcoves above the seating to reinforce the background audio.
More: www.2b-heard.com
