The 196-yard-long covered shopping arcade that runs from Piccadilly through to Burlington Gardens in the heart of the City of London houses an unmatchable selection of luxury boutiques favoured by well-heeled patrons.

When the Reuben Brothers bought the arcade, the new owners wanted to add atmosphere to the naturally lit, galleried Georgian space to provide a more welcoming ambience for shoppers. A discreet, high-quality music playback sound system was needed, and the brothers approached Crystal Palace-based Project Audio, specialists in custom-designed and high-end bespoke audio installations.

‘The challenge for us was to design a sound system that was not in any way intrusive either sonically or visually, which meant it had to be to all intents and purposes invisible,’ says Project Audio Director and Project Manager, Claire Munnelly. ‘Additionally, because the system had to be plug-and-play and essentially maintenance free, it had to be electronically bullet-proof.

‘We knew that Italian speaker manufacturer K-array offered a good range of solutions for this kind of application, and so we got in touch with K-array’s UK distributor 2B Heard who helped us to define the specification with an unobtrusive compact line array.’

Due to the relative inaccessibility of the hardware once installed, the Project Audio team adopted innovative approach to distributing the audio through the arcade, and that was a closed WiFi MESH network, a group of connectivity devices acting as a single network that provides multiple, dedicated and super-stable connections along the whole length of the Arcade.

‘It’s highly encrypted and can’t be infiltrated, and that means no taxi communications traffic breaking through the audio,’ Munnelly explains. ‘We believe it’s the first of its kind in an application like this, developed by our internal R&D team and requiring hours of software programming.’

Loudspeaker locations were limited to the spaces above the store fronts on both sides of the arcade, which led to the choice of K-array Vyper line arrays, whose narrow vertical dispersion and wide horizontal dispersion allowed them to be focused into the concourse and avoid reflections from the opposite side. The compact line arrays are evenly spaced along the length of the arcade, nine on each side, and are supplemented by a pair of Rumble-KU44 subwoofers.

The Vyper KV52 slim arrays contain eight 1-inch neodymium drive units in a 0.5m column high, white painted aluminium, and blend into the arcade interior such that they are barely visible. IP65 ingress protection rating was also a critical requirement in this application because the entirety of the arcade, including the loudspeakers, is routinely cleaned by high pressure water jet.

Central control for the audio system is located above a shop in the centre of the arcade where the playback device connects to the start of the MESH network, repeating all the way down to the 18 loudspeaker locations.

Installed out of hours when the Arcade closed at 10pm and working overnight, Project Audio completed the job in just under three-and-a-half weeks, a large propportion of that time being allocated to programming the network while the speakers were up and running in a couple of days with no major obstacles.

‘We’d heard of work that Project Audio had done previously and invited them to present a solution for the improved ambience that we were looking for,’ says a representative of Burlington’s technical management team. ‘They brought in some really innovative ideas for making sure the speaker systems were discreet – we didn’t want prominently visible black speaker boxes in there – so we spent some time in choosing systems with the right aesthetics and they made sure it all matched beautifully. It was a very consultative process.

‘We’re very happy with the sound of the speakers and that the system essentially operates hands-off – it starts up on an automatic timer in the morning and really doesn’t need any intervention, it’s truly set-and-forget. The background music is controlled from a tablet and certainly creates a relaxed atmosphere in the arcade that seems to go down well with shoppers. We’re really pleased with the outcome.’