The Café differs from the traditional restaurant concept in Colombia. Its space of 2585sq.ft is divided into two open floors and a third housing the FOH engineer and an office. Laid out more like a performance venue, with room for approximately 300 guests, Gaira Cafe offers live Latin, pop and vallenato - a musical style of Colombian Caribbean popular folk music - a category which was added to the Latin Grammys in 2006.
The sound design for the venue was executed by Sonic Design's Leonardo Vilar, whom together with his brother Mauricio consulted the venue on their design options. The senior Vilar's hire company C. Vilar Amplificacion Professional is the largest rental hire company in the country. They were also the very first Adamson customer in Latin America, and hold a special relationship with the company and its products.
"The Metrix system is very powerful, without missing clarity and definition. To our ears, it outperforms all systems in its category out there", comments Mauricio Vilar.
A pair of M15 were temporarily being used as a PA system until the right system could be brought in. The M15s are now permanently placed on the stage as wedges and an additional two M15s were added. The main system is a flown stereo system located right at the lip of the stage. Each hang is made up of a single Metrix Sub, four Metrix and two Metrix Ws, which offer more than enough power for the venue. The height of the system is calculated to cover both floors of the venue.
The only glitch that they encountered was that the audience is placed on the first and second floor, but the FOH engineer is on a closed-off third floor. Two additional Metrix were brought in and time aligned as reference monitors to solve the problem. Additional work at the cafe included some lighting which was installed at the same time as the new speaker system. Lab.Gruppen with Dolby Lake provide power and processing.
(Jim Evans)
