Middlesex Sound & Light (MSL) have successfully completed the largest contract in the company’s 41-year history, with the opening of the flagship Swingers crazy golf club in Las Vegas.
Set on a 40,000sq-ft site inside the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip, the venue employs 170 Martin Audio loudspeakers, including 122 CDD6 – continuing MSL’s use of the CDD line at Swingers London since before the corporate-friendly crazy golf concept expanded to the US. Swingers London was one of the first deployments of CDD and, to date MSL has racked up more CDD deployments than any other UK-based dealer.
Martin Audio now appears in all Swingers venues as the vibrant entertainment concept continues to evolve. Run with the support of MGM Resorts, the Las Vegas operation not offers four nine-hole crazy golf courses alongside Swingers’ new fairground-style Carnival games arcade concept.
Swingers is the brainchild of entrepreneurs Matt Grech-Smith and Jeremy Simmonds, with a long, 1920s style English country house dominating the central section of Swingers Las Vegas its façade and brought to life with a constant flow of projected imagery. Here, three Martin Audio Torus T1230 constant curvature arrays, flown discreetly on each side with a pair of cardioid SXCF118 subwoofers, create a classic proscenium PA system. Four CDD10 are located within the country house’s ‘sunken garden’ where the balcony doubles as a stage, providing a performance area for small combos, as well as corporate presentations. Further CDD10s are provided for artists’ reference sound, while in the lower section of the house is a DJ station – which comes into its own later in the day and extra volume is required. Elsewhere, 122 CDD6 boxes are distributed throughout the venue.
The Las Vegas site represents a conversion of the former Light nightclub, and the first site survey conducted by MSL System Designer Steve Billington invrstigated whether any of the existing sound equipment was salvageable. ‘It was clear that nothing could be reused, so with our existing brand template Martin Audio was always going to be the obvious choice,’ he says. ‘The question was how we could adapt this template to such a large-scale space that it is. With a constantly moving audience, the reason we choose CDD6 is because the dispersion is so wide, and it gives consistent coverage compared with a traditional speaker.’
MSL’s approach uses a ratio of three SX subs to 12 CDD6, with careful placement of an SXC115 (cardioid) subwoofer in the DJ booth, since there is an exclusive private hire space directly behind the DJ booth ‘and this keeps the impact on the dancefloor without bothering the VIP space’. Elsewhere, LF extension, where necessary, is provided through a combination of 30 SX110 and SX210 subwoofers.
Much of the magic had already taken place in the 3D software prior to installation. The design was modelled using Martin Audio’s Display3 visualisation software, importing Revit and SketchUp models provided by the architect.
‘SketchUp is a very powerful tool, allowing us to simulate everything, especially Torus,’ says Billington. ‘For while we’re very comfortable with CDD, which is a tried and tested formula, with Torus it was useful to be able to measure the coverage patterns.’
Both Billington and MSL MD Darrel Olivier acknowledge that although its footprint may be larger, ‘the beauty of the Torus boxes in this application is that they lose themselves because of the height we’ve installed them at’.
Signal distribution is via a 10GB network, with fully redundant fibre backbone running Dante from BSS Soundweb London into the process-controlled amplifiers.
‘When we started designing a flagship Swingers to take over the enormous Light nightclub space at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas – the entertainment capital of the world – it rapidly became clear that we were designing the best competitive socialising venue in the world,’ says Jeremy Simmonds, co-CEO and co-founder of Swingers. ‘MSL was the perfect partner on this ambitious project, bringing incredible creativity and a vast technical expertise to the table. MSL’s unique contribution is a huge part of the venue’s massive success.’
The Swingers programme is now set to be rolled out in other key US cities, before moving further afield.
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