Recently opened in Oxford, leisure venue Gallery Bouldering offers a peak experience for its customers, including a 100m expanse of bouldering wall and a dedicated gym space. There’s also a café that chalks the venue as a prime event space. Playing background music of differing intensities by zone during the day, the sound system was also required to support big screen action during major sports events.

The venue looked to Optimal Audio’s commercial audio ecosystem to meet its changing needs.

Optimal Audio UK distributor, Audio Technica, designed and installed a system to be in tune with the space, whatever the day’s needs. On some days, the four zones of Gallery Bouldering – the wall, the gym, the café and the reception area – function as separate areas with background music to suit, during the flow of the day. At other times, the system supports venue-wide events with all zones working together.

Controlling the full venue system is an Optimal Audio Zone 8 with DSP and Optimal Audio’s simple and intuitive cross-platform WebApp. From here the venue staff access or set presets and routines or make one-off changes across any or all of the zones. By automating the audio with automatic daily routines and standard presets, the staff in the busy venue have one less thing to think about.

Through the activity zones of the bouldering wall and the gym, Optimal Audio Up 6 two-way ceiling speakers provide high-quality audio without taking any valuable wall space. In these zones, four Optimal Audio 5-inch, two-way, Cuboid 5 full-range loudspeakers are wall-mounted to provide support for the 18 units from the Up range.

Providing the extra energy for big sporting events, two Optimal Audio Cuboid 8 two-way, full-range 8-inch loudspeakers are positioned either side of the (usually tucked away) projection screen. The full system is powered by three amplifiers, two SmartAmp30s and a single SmartAmp20, both featuring DSP to add speed and simplicity to the installation.

‘I am delighted with the sound quality of the Optimal Audio system,’ Gallery owner Jamie Wakeham reports. ‘I’m hard to impress and this is genuinely good. The 100V line speakers have good sparkle and clarity, and the Cuboid 8s add the right amount of heft without ever getting in the way. It was straightforward to hide all the speakers too – they fit neatly at the top of the climbing wall structure, and the larger speakers are tucked behind it. I’m very happy with the overall appearance as well as audio quality.’

See also: 
New Revolution gym fit for purpose with Optimal Audio

More: www.optimal-audio.co.uk