With locations established in Portland, Cleveland and Philadelphia, the Sage Restaurant Group, has opened a fourth Urban Farmer Restaurant in Denver, Colorado. The Urban Farmer Restaurant Denver continues the chain’s focus on locally- and sustainably-grown food, calling on Interface Communications to add a sound system that would respect the historic nature of the new venue’s space.
‘The big challenge at Urban Farmer Restaurant Denver was the historical nature of the building,’ says Interface Communications A/V Services Manager, Mark Gwartney. ‘There are also hotel rooms above the space, so we had to do some very structurally-sensitive sound-proofing.
‘As far as loudspeakers were concerned, the ceiling was off limits, making a traditional in-ceiling distributed system out of the question. Through our work with the Sage Restaurant Group at the Maven Hotel in Denver, we learned that they have very high standards for sound quality – many of their properties have live bands and the owner has a background in live sound.’
Interface Communications chose the fidelity and high-SPL of some of Danley Sound Lab’s smallest boxes for the job – the SH-mini and the TH-mini with their Synergy and Tapped Horn technology. High-quality sound spilling out of the open windows was part of a deliberate strategy to draw passersby into the restaurant, given its prominent location and heavy foot traffic.
‘When I think of high fidelity for something like this, I think of Danley’s clear voicing and musical toning,’ Gwartney says. ‘Standard 70V bandwidth wouldn’t cut it. At our first meeting, the restaurant manager, Troy Christian said, “take the standard system you might normally put into a restaurant like this and imagine how loud it could go – that’s my half-way point”.
‘But he wasn’t just thinking about volume, really; he knew that with more speakers, each could be run at a lower volume with better overall results. Another big challenge was that we had to be discrete about the aesthetic, so I needed really small boxes with high SPL that still sounded great. These days, Danley gets a lot of press for the giant, stadium-sized boxes they build – boxes a person could stand in! We had to go in the opposite direction, to the “mini” loudspeakers and subs which fit the design perfectly.’
In all, 16 Danley SH-mini loudspeakers and three TH-mini subwoofers serve the Urban Farmer Restaurant Denver, with a vintage grille cloth to blend with the rustic interior. Crown amplifiers power the system, with Biamp DSP. The BiAmp processor works with a Crestron/iPad control system to give restaurant managers control of the heavily-zoned system wirelessly. ‘The zone control is down to speaker pairs,’ Gwartney says. ‘They can really tweak every little seating area to get the balance in the room exactly to their liking.’
