Sailors

After being approached by owners Stonegate Group with a brief to make Sailors ‘stand out from the rest’, Middlesex Sound & Lighting used a variety of solutions to provide an upgrade and overhaul of the seaside town venue’s visual and audio technology.

The venue is split into two spaces – winter and summer, with the idea for the smaller ‘winter’ room to operate out of season with roller shutters keeping clients from the much larger ‘summer’ room.

The audio system was improved with the installation of new Powersoft amplifiers, as the existing sound system – using loudspeakers from the Martin Audio CDD series and CSX218 subwoofers – was being driven by a large, eclectic mix of amplifiers that were tired, approaching their end of life and lacked what the system should be able to deliver.

As a result, two Powersoft Quattrocanali 4804 amplifiers and two Quattrocanali 2404 amplifiers were installed to run all the peripheral areas, while the main dance floor area is still utilising four Martin Audio Wavefront W3 loudspeakers, and are now powered by a Quattrocanali 4804, and a Powersoft K3 amp powers the CSX218 subs.

“The K3 was installed five years ago, along with all the existing Martin Audio speakers and subs, and I couldn’t justify replacing that either because it was still performing perfectly, which is a testament to its build quality,” said Toby Jones, AV Designer, Middlesex Sound & Lighting. “With this re-design of the sound, the existing audio system is back to where it should be.”

The venue’s new truss is equipped with eight CHAUVET Intimidator Hybrid 140SR moving heads and four CHAUVET R1X Spots, which are evenly distributed, with four Showtec Sunstrip blinder bars, side-mounted to face the mezzanine.

Over 350m of RGB LED tape and custom-built 360° and 300° LED 1m RGBW tubes provide extra effect lighting in the bar areas, booths and bottle steps, which are powered by Mean Well 24V transformers and 32-channel DMX encoders.

Happy with the selection of light fixtures, Jones admitted he needed to complement them with something to enhance the space and step it up a level.

Six custom-built five-sided 1m transparent video cubes were deployed at different heights on the truss, so that they appeared to float, and they are semi-transparent meaning that light can pass through them. Initially, the idea was to install moving heads inside them, however, that proved not to be functional, so it was decided to fly them, floating in proximity to the CHAUVET fixtures, with their beams passing through them creating a nice effect.

Also deployed are deployed 16 500mm by 1,000mm video panels to the rear stage wall in an exploded design, with four more Showtec Sunstrip blinder bars, a 3W RGB full-colour Unity laser from Kvant, and four CHAUVET FX1b fixtures situated in between.

In addition, three Optoma ZH406 projectors are utilised on custom mounts for projection mapping the 8m wall behind the mezzanine bar, which links the area with the atmosphere on the dance floor.

In the smaller room, which has a lower ceiling of 2.4m, a new LED pixel ceiling was created and installed to hit the brief. The self-contained custom 4m by 5m LED grid ceiling features 224mm by 100mm wide RGBW pixels, spaced at 250mm intervals, all mounted within a frame with thick opaque Perspex protecting it.

This ceiling comes alive via programming from a Madrix 5 server and linked to a ShowCAD server over an Artnet splitter, this, in turn, controls the rest of the fx lighting in the winter club and the reception area pixel ceiling – which features 40m of 24V RGB pixel tape, controlled by two Madrix Nebulas.

Inside the main space, the old trusses, which were aluminium, were replaced with a black power-coated tri truss in a large rectangular shape, with the middle section’s legs hanging 750mm lower.

The new truss blends into the black ceiling and allows for the fixtures to be hung there in a very discreet manner.

A Resolume Arena 7 sever supplies signal path, with three video outputs – one serving the LED cubes, one for the exploded video panels via an additional NovaStar controller, and a third is for edge blending the content from the projectors, which is delivered via a DataPath FX interface over HDBaseT.

Cues are sent to the Resolume server from the main ShowCAD server using touchscreen control in the main room’s DJ booth. That same ShowCAD server also controls the smaller winter room’s ShowCAD server over Artnet, which allows the LD to transition from the winter club lighting control location to the summer club control location using just one interface and a one-touch solution for both spaces.

The total cost of the refurbishment came to £1.9 million and took place over a 12-month period, with work done at various intervals. The result is phenomenal and the whole dance floor has become immersive, with sound, light and video used at its best.