Liquid Aberdeen's main room and dancing area holds approximately 1,100 people and has a huge architectural 'bulkhead' over the dancefloor containing sound and lighting equipment (the latter supplied by Design Intervention). Within the same building, the smaller upstairs room is one of Luminar's popular 'Envy' brand, aimed at the over 25s, which was also kitted out with JBL by Over Audio.
Liquid itself demanded a large volume of sound concentrated onto the main dancefloor area, so six JBL SP215-6s from the Sound Power series were specified, contained within the bulkhead. Low frequencies are dealt with by two different pairs of JBL Sound Power subs - SP125s and SP128s, both located on the floor either side of the DJ booth. Upstairs in Envy, the idea was to replicate a similar but more 'rounded' sonic experience in a more sophisticated ambience. This time they went for mix of JBL Sound Power SP212-9s and SP215-6s, complete with SP125 subs. This room features a much lower ceiling height, and the speakers were primarily selected for their unobtrusiveness and size-to-power ratio.
Arbiter also supplied four DBX 481S drive racks, utilized for system processing in both rooms. The DBX unit includes every form of processing necessary to drive the signal from the mixer to the power amps in a compact 1U 19" rack mounted enclosure. The DBX 481S features a fully configurable 4-input, 8-output routing matrix with its very powerful complement of DSP providing comprehensive equalization (31-band graphic EQ on each input and a 4-band parametric EQ on each output), time alignment delay, crossovers, filtering, input and output gain and compression/limiting on each output for speaker component protection. The output compressor can be configured as a precise digital model of the classic DBX 160A, and the DBX 481S is the only signal processing needed to set-up and protect the sound system for an entire venue.
(Lee Baldock)
