The building has housed clubs of various descriptions for some years, before recently being acquired by the Ignite group, and transformed into a intimate, uniquely branded and highly atmospheric venue in their extremely select group.
CP Sound has completed several projects for Ignite over the last three years, and once again Colin Pattenden was approached for his technical input into Volstead in its prime Swallow Street, Soho, location.
Ignite wanted refined and classy audio to compliment Satmoko Ball's provocative neo art deco interior design which involves plenty of mirrored and reflective surfaces oozing glamour. The outside walls of the space are wrapped in a dark green inverted cityscape made from polycarbonate cladding.
They also wanted to be able to control sound tightly in specific areas, so Pattenden's design separates the areas into a total of seven independent zones of audio. There's also a small raised live performance area next to the DJ booth.
The main dance-floor is zone one and the adjacent area dropped ceiling/raised floor is zone two, with the zone three seated area being the other side of the dance-floor. Zone four is next to the bar and zone five is the bar itself. Zone six is the toilets and zone seven the entrance. "It wasn't a huge job in terms of scale," explains Pattenden, "but like all Ignite's venues, the brief was very precise and quality was the absolute priority."
He picked JBL, he says, because they move with the times in terms of components, engineering and build. The system also had to be versatile, dynamic and sound equally as good for DJ, background music or occasional live acts.
Two JBL SRX 718s bass bins inject the dance-floor with a serious shot of low-end energy, and there's then six JBL Control 29s for nice clear mid-tops. The Control 29s were also ideal for their compact size and ability to blend into the design. The adjacent area - zone two - features four JBL Control 26C ceiling speakers and over the other side of the dance-floor, zone three has two Control 28s.
Zone four, next to the bar, has two Control 28s and the bar itself has two Control 25s. There's two Control 24C's in the toilets, and a single Control 24C Micros in the entrance completes the picture.
"The technical audio challenge was designing each area with its own evenly spread sound-field that didn't interfere with any of the others," says Pattenden, adding that equally as demanding was the aesthetic task of ensuring that the dance-floor speakers didn't protrude beyond on the decorated ceiling area - with its impressive mirrored scalloped surface.
The system is powered by RSE amplifiers throughout, which is CP Sound's standard amplifier of choice, says the company. "I have not found an amplifier to beat this for any installation application," says Pattenden.
For the DJ box, Pattenden specified two Technics 1210 dex, two Pioneer CDJ 1000s MK3 and an Allen & Heath 262 mixer plus and an eight channel Soundcraft PA mixer for live acts for which he wanted a "small, neat and simple solution". He also specified three AKG D880 hand-held vocal mics, a DI box and the JBL stage monitor which doubles as a DJ monitor, complete with a changeover switch.
(Chris Henry)
