Panacea is the brainchild of one of the City's smartest young local party people and entrepreneurs, Joe Akka. Superlative acoustics was seen as absolutely crucial to creating Panacea's essential atmosphere. Akka contacted Adlib Audio's Andy Dockerty via recommendations from Kennedy Street Enterprises, and asked him to design an appropriate system - keeping the speakers as invisible as possible.
Dockerty - renowned for his attention to detail and quality and Dave Fletcher, who produced all the cabinet work, designed, specified and built a tailor-made system for Panacea. This involved embedding four speakers into each of Panacea's structural pillars with a minimal extrusion to ensure the preservation and integrity of the interior design.
Dockerty collaborated closely with designer Bernard Carroll throughout. Adlib had previously worked with him on the Mosquito Club in Liverpool and so a good dialogue existed between the two as well as a mutual respect for what their departments needed to achieve.
Initially, ADLIB supplied several samples of paintwork for the speaker grills to ensure an exact colour match and no degradation of the audio. Minute details included no bagding on the speaker grills, and even white foam behind them. Each of the four speakers had to be literally manufactured inside each pillar. Carroll insisted there was no angle at all on the protruding parts of the speakers, which made focussing the sound - particularly the mid-highs - very interesting.
Adlib solved this by building the compression drivers into the cabinet's wooden housing, angled at 15 degrees downwards and on a pivot. This pivot allows the drivers to be angled up to 40 degrees in each direction. The best angles were then selected when commissioning the system, to provide a smooth dispersion around the long, low ceilinged room.
The installation utilizes a total of 35 ADLIB AA61 speaker enclosures and six AA 15BP flat subs, the latter all dug into the floor below the seating, plus one dual hybrid version of the sub fitted under the stairs. There's also a single 12" sub ensconced in the ceiling.
Panacea is divided into 3 audio zones - the bar, restaurant and the booth seating, and there's three separate remote volume controls that can be operated by the managers. Dockerty also specified a Soundweb 'Jellyfish' controller at the DJ booth position, which is primarily for Joe Akka to insert his own specific programmes. Powered by Crown CE Series amplifiers, the background music source is a C-Burn MP3 system, and Adlib also supplied the full DJ set up, including Pioneer CDJ 1000s, and Allen & Heath Xone 62 mixer and Technics 1210 dex.
Akka said: "Adlib were fantastic. They listened to what I needed, assessed the room thoroughly, worked alongside all others involved in the project, and delivered exactly the right system with exactly the right attitude. Their approach was scientific, they were helpful at every juncture and paid meticulous attention to detail."
(Sarah Rushton-Read)
