Integration/installation company AVI-SPL Special Projects Group has installed a Clair Brothers sound system at the Hard Rock Cafe Hollywood inside the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Florida.

The casino floor’s ambience can affect the acoustics of a restaurant and music venue and this room was designed to have a live acoustic character.

The system includes two Clair Brothers C8 line arrays – five cabinets per side, two CS118 subs per side, plus a stage monitor system made up of six signature Clair Brothers 1AM floor monitors.

“It’s a bit of a challenging venue for audio because of its lively restaurant environment. It requires a delicate balance between the interior design and the production needs of achieving great live stage sound,” said Tom Knauss, principal consultant at KMK Technologies, the audio consultant firm hired by Hard Rock to design the new system. “Hard Rock places equal importance on how the room’s interior looks with regard to high-level design and how excellent the room sounds during shows.”

According to Josh Sadd, chief design engineer at Clair Brothers, “The stage is completely surrounded by a restaurant and bar so one of the biggest challenges was maintaining a consistent sound for someone sitting at a table right in front of the stage, at a table twelve feet away, and someone else at a table in the back, let’s say a hundred and twenty-five feet away. That challenge was well met by the capabilities of this C8 system and the particular ability for us to control the sound in the vertical plane. This is due to the new component and waveguide type that we’re using at Hard Rock Cafe. In that regard, maintaining a balanced sound throughout the room, which would otherwise be difficult using a different speaker system, was easily achieved based on our array technology.”

“They say in sound it’s better to have more than you need than to need more than you have,” added operations manager Ed Sullivan. “At Hard Rock Cafe there’s no chance of the latter. The system was designed with plenty of headroom, and the Clair C8/C118 PA has met or exceeded expectations in every respect. The main system was assembled and tested at the Clair Brothers facility in Manheim, Pennsylvania, and the Lab.gruppen amplifiers, with Lake Processors, were configured and tested along with them.”

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Producer, mixer and songwriter Keith Ross has recently installed a pair of Genelec 8350A Smart Active Monitors and a 7380A Smart Active Subwoofer in his personal studio.

Ross, a long-term Genelec fan based in South Florida, has worked with a number of top recording artists, including Fifth Harmony, The Roots, Pitbull, Boyz II Men, Timbaland, Enrique Iglesias, Robin Thicke, and Nelly amongst others.

“I’ve been using Genelec for over a decade – the last set I had were the 8340As and I’ve owned several previous Genelecs,” said Ross. “But this studio is the most custom room I’ve ever had; it’s a top-of-the-line build-out in a new home, so I wanted the absolute top of the line for monitoring here, and that’s the 8350As. They are amazing.”

The 8350A speakers, which were sold through Scott Katz at ScitScat Music in Miami, were installed as part of a studio design by Shane White of Legacy Acoustic Designs. “I’m not such a fan of booths,” Ross explained. “I like to be able to interact with artists as they’re recording. So we designed a section of the room for microphone placement that keeps us in the same creative space and not separated by a plate of glass.”

Customisation of his workspace is why Ross also likes Genelec’s Smart Active Monitor features, such as the proprietary Genelec Loudspeaker Manager (GLM) network and software, enabling users to build a highly flexible and reliable monitoring system. “I absolutely am taking advantage of the smart features,” said Ross. “Tuning the speakers to the room was a piece of cake because once the room curve showed up in the GLM software, I could see visually exactly which frequencies to adjust. It was so accurate that when I listened after visually compensating on the EQ, they sounded perfect.”

The first project the new Genelec 8350A monitors were used on is a single for Republic Records artist Bria Lee, joined on the track by guest artists Pitbull, a longtime collaborator of Ross’, and Fat Joe. The track, “One Shot,” was released on April 5 and is currently featured on Billboard.com as it gains traction at radio.

www.genelec.com

www.keithrossmusic.com

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Renkus-Heinz has announced that Indianapolis-based firm The Marketeers will represent its products in Florida and Puerto Rico, effective immediately.

"With its more than decade-long history of representing musical instrument and commercial audio brands in the Midwest and Southeast, The Marketeers are ideally positioned to help expand our reach," said Joe Fustolo, Eastern regional sales manager at Renkus-Heinz. "Demand for theme park, worship, and concert sound is growing in Florida and especially Puerto Rico, and with The Marketeers’ channel partners and reputation for customer service, we intend to be at the head of the class in those markets and more."

"Renkus-Heinz ups our game," added Marketeers owner David Mottinger. "Their advanced technologies, such as their ICONYX series’ precise digital beam-steering for custom coverage patterns and their Complex Conic constant-directivity horns are industry benchmarks. The sheer quality of their systems will help us serve a new level of client and venue – the kind that demands nothing but the best."

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