Forced out of premises in an industrial building in Basel, Switzerland, EDM nightclub Nordstern owner Agi Isaku chose a former riverboat docked on the River Rhine for its new location. With the verssel secured, he called in acoustic consulting and audiovisual integration firm WSDG to handle external sound isolation and internal room acoustics for the ultimate floating discotheque experience.
Before its transformation, the boat served as the Expo Star, a bar/restaurant. Isaku had it towed to Holland, where the whole ship was skinned and then redone with the nightclub inside, under the direction of the architect in charge of interior design, Gabriel Heusser. With the boat back in Basel and docked on the Rhine just across the river from Huningue, France, WSDG partner and Director of Acoustics Gabe Hauser took charge of the new Nordstern’s sound isolation, acoustics, and audio design.
Besides the novelty of the club being on the bottom floor of a boat and mostly below the water line, Hauser also had a mandate to make the sound inaudible from outside the club: ‘Having been used for transportation of coal, the boat already had a two-layered thick steel hull,’ he explains. ’We added decoupled sidewalls for sound isolation, low-frequency absorbers and, to save room height, a floor that’s isolated by using a special kind of compact decoupling mat. We also installed a highly absorptive ceiling, and we angled the hard, reflective walls upwards by about seven degrees to project sound energy to the absorptive ceiling and keep flutter echoes from happening. This also helps to reduce the reverberation time.’
Hauser used acoustic modelling to show Isaku that angling the wall up could help with sound absorption and therefore save on acoustic material, but there was another problem to solve. Due to the fact that many of the EDM DJs that Nordstern puts on use vinyl records, the club’s main subwoofers could not be too close to the DJ booth or low-frequency vibration might cause records to skip. Nor could the subwoofers be placed on the floor and still meet the requirements for balanced low-frequency distribution across the dancefloor.
‘We had to find a way to focus the low-end on the dance floor to keep it away from the entrance and the DJ booth,’ Hauser says. ‘We installed a line of six subwoofers in a row over the top of the dance floor that radiates in a cylindrical pattern along the length of the room. It’s a long and wide sound wave resulting in very even coverage of the dance-floor and steep drop in SPL at the two ends of the dance-floor towards the DJ booth and the entrance area. This approach might be a bit unusual, but it worked great.’
Hauser chose all L-Acoustics loudspeakers for the installation – siting six SB28 subwoofers over the dancefloor, he used eight ARCS II speakers for the mid/high, paired in four two-speaker arrays suspended from each corner of the 20m x 10m, 700-capacity room. The DJ booth system uses two lower-powered X15 speakers and accompanying SB18 subs, and bar area fill is handled by two X12 full-range loudspeakers. Lighting and video projections play a big role in Nordstern’s party vibe, with booths for the VJ (video jockey) and LJ (light jockey) flanking each side of the bar and facing the projection screen behind the DJ booth.
‘Despite the unique circumstances and additional challenges, we’ve received great reviews for the sound quality when it was finished,’ Hauser reflects. ’One of our recording studio clients is legendary techno producer and DJ Carl Craig, and he posted that this is the best-sounding club that he has ever played in.’
