A former church building in Toronto’s Little Italy now provides a live performance space for the local music community. While its designation as a Toronto historic building requires its frontage to be preserved, there is no restriction inside…

Having opened in 2000 as the Revival Bar, Manager Mathew Saturnino recently decided to upgrade the 400-capacity venue’s sound system with the Electro-Voice X1 system from the X-Line Advance line-array loudspeaker family.

‘There’s a lot of competition in live entertainment, and quality of the sound system is one thing that sets one venue apart from another,’ he says. ‘We wanted a system that would sound great, with really good, tight sound output within the room. We did a lot of research, and the X1 from Electro-Voice seemed like the perfect fit – newer technology that would give us a very good competitive edge.’

The installation was performed by Mississauga-based integration firm Pure AV, with the system being designed by Clint Alves of SoundSoft Productions. Using Electro-Voice LAPS software, the design is based around two five-box arrays of Electro-Voice X1-212/90 loudspeakers, augmented by four X12-128 dual 18-inch subwoofers. The system is powered by six Electro-Voice TG7 amplifiers, all fitted with RCM-28 network and DSP modules to enable easy monitoring and control via IRIS-Net software. The team at PureAV ran the wiring in advance so that, once the shipment of loudspeakers arrived, the entire installation could be done in one day.

‘I personally lent a hand on the labour and it was a 19-hour day, but well worth it,’ Saturnino says. ‘From tearing down the old system to having everything plugged in and powered up, there were zero hiccups. Everything worked perfectly and sounded great right from the start.’

The twin arrays hang above the stage lip, using their tight 90° dispersion to create even coverage across the whole area. The four X12-128 subwoofers are hidden beneath the stage in a phase-aligned cluster. The entire sound system is digital, with AES50 (open-standard protocol for audio transport over Ethernet) running from front of house to the stage and amplifiers.

‘This is a fantastic product,’ Saturnino reports. ‘The artists and engineers love it, and it brings us up a level competitively,’’ he says, ‘It’s also very rider-friendly, which means we can book bigger and better acts. I frequent many different venues in the city and have heard everything, including some very expensive systems, and I would put our EV up against any of them.’