Up on the 15th floor of NYC’s Hotel Indigo, Mr Purple is a stylish indoor/outdoor, rooftop bar and restaurant with views across Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Created by hospitality industry leader, Gerber Group and designed by Crème Design to reflect an artist loft ambiance, the venue’s audio system comprises Tannoy loudspeakers and Lab.gruppen C Series amplifiers.
Although Ernie Lake of EL Media Group designed the audio system, Scott Gerber, Principle and Chief Executive Officer of Gerber Group drove the equipment choices: ‘We have a relationship with Scott because we did the Viceroy Hotel and consulted on other projects for him, and maintain some of his other bars,’ Lake says. ‘We’ve used Tannoy and Lab.gruppen in other venues and they work well, so it was an easy sell.’
‘It’s great that EL Media use Tannoy and Lab.gruppen in so many installs, and it’s really cool when the products gets called out by the end-user,’ says Sam Spennacchio of Audio Associates, who represent Tannoy and Lab.gruppen in NYC. ‘That doesn’t happen very often.’
Eight Tannoy VX 8.2s powered by two Lab.gruppen C28:4s are installed in Mr. Purple, with another C28:4 used for the restaurant/bar’s third-party subs. Additionally, four Tannoy VX 5.2s are used as fill speakers, located in a bookshelf in the bar. For the adjacent outdoor decks and pool, Lake opted for Tannoy AMS Series loudspeakers – 14 AMS 5DCs and four AMS 6DCs driven by Lab.gruppen C20:8s. Tannoy AMS 5DCs, also powered by Lab.gruppen amps, were installed in the hotel’s entry.
‘About two years ago, we opened up a restaurant called Kingside Restaurant at the Viceroy Hotel,’ Gerber says. ‘We used the same equipment there and were very, very pleased. So when this came up we, and EL Media, were comfortable with it.’
The AMS were chosen, in part, for their weatherproofing: ‘But the AMS is also a speaker you can easily hide,’ Lake says. ‘They obviously wanted good sound, but didn’t want to see any speakers on the terraces. Scott also wanted to contain the sound, so we placed the AMS 5DCs low on the perimeter of the outdoor deck. They’re small, but give us more than enough sound and coverage.
‘We love the fact that they are easy to set up, have the option for 70V applications and we know they’re reliable,’ he adds. ‘They’re a workhorse.’
Some areas of the bar required acoustic treatment owing to reflections from windows and hard surfaces. ‘There are many spaces, he says, whose owners give little thought to audio beyond covering the space with painfully loud, sound that’s intelligible, only to the point that you know you’re listening to music, but wish you weren’t,’ Lake says. ‘That’s a big problem because audio is always last because, often, the client is dealing with an electrician who might not understand what good audio is. But we’re seeing a change in the industry, where people want companies like ours to come in early, and explain to the client that, if they want good sound, this is what they need to do.’
Typically, in challenging environments requiring highly intelligible, but unobtrusive audio, Tannoy is often EL Media’s product of choice. ‘Particularly multiple zone venues. They’re perfect for background and foreground. Sometimes, with a high-powered speaker, it’s tough to get it to perform at a lower level. What we get with Tannoy is quality without having to turn it up.’
That’s particularly important at Mr Purple: ‘We change the level as the night picks up,’ Gerber says, ‘but we’re going for high quality, clean, crisp music at lower levels. By no means was this meant to be a heart-thumping, club system.’</p>\r\n<div>‘This room has very high ceilings so we could have put in much bigger speakers and a much bigger system, but that’s not what we were going for,’ he concludes.
