Birmingham’s new Roxy Ball Room mixes old and new, with a classic American-style ten-lane bowling alley, pool tables and shuffle boards, and a bar, and extensive modern audio system from integrator Audioserv, which has previously installed the audio in a number of other Roxy Ball Room locations around the UK.
‘We’ve been working with Roxy Ball Room since the beginning of the brand in 2013,’ explains Audioserve Technical Director, Pete Rollinson. ‘For the Birmingham venue, we designed an audio system to give consistent coverage across the whole of the space, with an added impact in certain areas of the venue, as we’ve done with the other Roxy Ball Room locations.’
With support from audio distributor CUK Audio, the installation makes good use of Powersoft amplifier platforms. Audioserv worked with Roxy Leisure’s Matt Jones to deliver a system that had the ability to sound like a club system when required, but also could provide balanced, high-quality background music. The system was created using Turbosound loudspeakers, Powersoft amplifiers and Audac enclosures.
Loudspeaker placement was critical to provide sound coverage from the rear, upstairs of the ballroom to the end of the bowling lanes. Mounted horizontally on the upstairs rear wall of the venue, five Turbosound TSC122 loudspeaker cabinets are paired with two NuQ118B subwoofers. Above the bar, ten Turbosound NuQ82 loudspeakers are mounted to provide coverage for this area, with another five Turbosound TSC122 loudspeakers and two NuQ118B subwoofers to cover the area between the bar and the bowling lanes.
‘It would have been tempting to use smaller boxes, but they would have started to sound thin in such a large volume of space,’ Rollinson comments.
To power and manage the loudspeakers, Audioserv selected three Powersoft Quattrocanali 4804 and 2404 fixed install amplifiers: ‘We have been using Powersoft amplifiers for years. In many of our installations, we use multiple channels of audio for either the number of loudspeakers we use, or the amount of different time alignment delays,’ Rollinson says. ‘Having a huge number of channels of conventional amplifiers would take up a massive amount of room in what is usually a small office.
‘We have supplied amplifiers from Powersoft’s installation range to Roxy Ball Room on different projects before, as well as a number of other clients. They sound excellent, they are extremely small physically and their power consumption is exceptionally low.’
The Quattrocanali series has been designed with small to medium sized installation projects in mind. The series can operate with Lo-Z (from 2Ω) and 70V/100V distributed lines, or any mix of the two, and features the patented SRM (Smart Rails Management) technology allowing it to maximise the efficiency of the system and drastically reduce power consumption. It also features the lowest thermal dissipation in the industry, minimising the need for external cooling systems. In particular, Quattrocanali 4804 boasts Powersoft switch mode power supply – up to 400V AC tolerant with Power Factor Correction.
‘Overall, we were pleased with the outcome of the project,’ Rollinson concludes. ‘And with careful adjustments of the different areas, we managed to minimise the potential sound reverb which is always a concern for large venues like this one.’
