Joining India’s chain of blueFrog bars, the blueFrog in Pune continues the theme of combining dining, live entertainment and ambience. With two successful bars open in Delhi and Mumbai, the blueFrog mission is ‘to make every performance memorable for the artist, production team and audience’.
The Pune venue anticipated entertaining a diverse, young and demanding local audience, and commissioned Munro Acoustics India to devise high-end sound system that would handle folk, jazz, pop and heavy rock with equal ease. The venue includes two full glass walls impressive to the audience but a problem for sound design. Kapil Thirwani, acoustic consultant for Munro Acoustics chose an L-Acoustics’ XTi Architectural Series point-source for the main system, with delay fills and a pair of SB28 subs.
The install took ten days, with a further week spent on optimising the system: ‘The architect was very helpful in the process; many a time we are given pre-defined points to hang our speakers, so that’s so often a major stumbling block, but here in Pune, we were given free rein to do what was best for the sound,’ explains Thirwani. ‘To overcome the reflections challenge, we played with the height and the wide splay angles of the XT system and then worked out an acoustic model to avoid these unwanted reflections. It worked perfectly.’
The blueFrog set-up is more like a performance venue than a bar, as FOH is integral, and the engineer gets the prime seat in the house. ‘We use the XTs in our Mumbai venue and for Pune, there was no other option in my mind, as the XT system offers a clean, powerful aural output, no matter the genre of music; and of course, music is the main ingredient of this space, as every night there is a band, DJ, or live act.
‘The amplifiers are magnificent pieces of equipment, and they give the designer full flexibility to route signals discretely, which helps the FOH engineer in panning and playing with the delays,’ he adds. ‘It really is the best amplifier and processor system I have ever come across, so I’ll never use anything else.’
Although the system can be driven harder if required, it is run at between 112 and 115dB SPL: ‘I think in the XT Series, L-Acoustics really have used some outstanding drivers that perform entirely seamlessly across all the frequency bands,’ Thirwani says. ‘It’s a great sounding system here in Pune, and the blueFrog managing director, Simran Mulchandani, thinks so too, which is just what we like to hear,’
According to Mulchandani, L-Acoustics has been ‘brilliantly efficient’: ‘Our patrons have reacted very positively – many are in awe of the sound – and all of our home-grown Indian artists as well as international visiting artists have only had positive things to say about the sound, which is fantastic.’
