Swingers

The flagship Swingers crazy golf location opened in Las Vegas recently inside the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.

With a relationship that dates back almost ten years, Middlesex Sound & Lighting (MSL) have been equipping Swingers locations in the UK and USA with a complete AV package purposefully designed for each individual space.

Opening in November 2024, the Las Vegas location represents the biggest project in the company’s history, with Swingers taking up a huge 40,000 sq ft site inside the resort.

Swingers is the brainchild of two successful entrepreneurs, Matt Grech-Smith and Jeremy Simmonds, and after a successful pop-up venue in 2014 the first permanent sites opened in central London in May 2016, followed by a second venue in Oxford Circus in 2018.

MSL delivered the full AV solution for both of those locations, and as a result were contracted by the venue’s ownership to kit out its sites in Washington, D.C. in June 2021, followed by Manhattan, NYC, in June 2022.

Leading the project on the latest location in Las Vegas was Steve Billington, Project and New Business Development Manager at MSL.

“Development of the AV specifications for Swingers venues has been an ongoing process as we assess the needs of each individual site, but throughout all of them we have always used Martin Audio loudspeakers, and for professional lighting fixtures we use CHAUVET Professional, in addition to the large amounts of pixel and effect lighting,” said Billington.

Swingers is situated in the former home of the LIGHT nightclub within Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino and offers four 9-hole crazy golf courses and a new fairground-style Carnival games arcade concept.

The focal point dominating the entire central section of Swingers Las Vegas is a long,1920s style English country house, with its façade brought to life with a constant flow of video projected imagery.

Here, two Martin Audio TORUS T1230 constant curvature arrays consisting of three elements, flown discreetly on each side with a pair of cardioid SXCF118 subwoofers, create a classic proscenium PA system.

Four powerful CDD10 are located within the ‘sunken garden’ where the generous balcony doubles as a stage, providing a performance area or a space for 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 lift is required. Elsewhere, no fewer than 122 CDD6 boxes are distributed throughout the venue.

“Martin Audio solutions were always going to be our choice here, the question we faced was how we could adapt our Swingers brand template from previous locations to such a large-scale space as this,” said Billington.

“With a constantly moving audience, the reason we choose CDD6 is because the dispersion is so wide, and gives consistent coverage compared to a traditional speaker,” continued Billington, explaining that the speaker achieves a rectangular, extendable coverage pattern, which is ultra-wide close to the speaker.

MSL’s approach is broadly to allocate a ratio of three SX subs to 12 CDD6. Here, they have also been careful to place an SXC115 (cardioid) in the DJ booth, since there is an exclusive private hire space directly behind the DJ booth.

“This keeps the impact on the dancefloor without disrupting the VIP space,” noted Billington. Elsewhere, LF extension, where necessary, is provided through a combination of 30 SX110 and SX210 subwoofers.

“After our first initial site visit in January 2023, once the architect was onboarded, we worked in 3D using Revit and SketchUp to outline the venue’s space and its technological infrastructure,” said Billington.

The audio system’s design was modelled using Martin Audio’s advanced 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,” said Billington. “We are very comfortable with the CDD range, which is a tried and tested formula, but with TORUS it was useful to be able to measure its coverage patterns.”

The site consists of 21 audio zones, and a total of 25 Powersoft Quattrocanali 2404 DSP+D amplifiers and four Martin Audio iK42 amplifiers power the system, while DSP is provided by BSS BLU-100 and BSS BLU-326DA units.

When it came to the projection mapping element on the English country house façade, Billington again called up a trusted source of equipment, utilising five Optoma ZU1300 projectors, with content fed by Resolume servers.

“We have previously worked quite extensively with Optoma projectors, and as part of the Swingers Broadway site in New York City we put together a five projector edge blending solution, which spanned 20m, using their projectors,” said Billington.

“Because of our strong relationship with the brand we worked with them to develop a solution for the Las Vegas project. These projectors are really high quality and stand the test of time and usage. The ones used at the Broadway location have been running constantly for approaching three years and we haven’t had an issue with them.”

The venue’s lighting is a mix of professional fixtures, digital pixel tape, and LED cabochon lights, with over 40 CHAUVET Professional fixtures chosen for their flexibility.

“We designed the lighting rigs with a variety of moving heads so that the fixtures can illuminate different areas of the space, and it was a choice to keep things flexible,” said Billington. “We have a mix of Rogue R3x Wash, Rogue R3E Spot, Rogue R2X Wash and COLOrado 1 Solo fixtures, and we also selected five Portman P2 Evo fixtures which are deployed by the DJ booth.”

Seven Custom PCs were designed by MSL to run Resolume software for the video content, Madrix software for the pixel lighting control, ChamSys MagicQ software for lighting fixture control, and a server for an ONLX Control Suite.

“The whole AV network is run via Netgear AV Line switches, and there are eight which run on fibre with a 20g backbone to each switch, as a minimum, so it’s a considerable network with over 200 devices in the network,” stated Billington. “This allows complete flexibility across the space and we can distribute the amplification as well, so it’s not just one rack of amplifiers that is distributed across the space. This also makes for an efficient cable run without the need for an excessive cable infrastructure.”

A WyreStorm Network HD 500 System controls the content across the venue’s 17 LG displays, 12 of which are set up around the venue’s two bar locations. “ONELAN digital signage players allow us to manage the content, sending video to the various screens,” confirmed Billington. “This gets fed into the WyreStorm AVoverIP solution, meaning we can send one player to specific screens, it’s a very flexible system.

“All of the AV racks for the venue were assembled in our facility in the UK, so the amplification, network switching and servers was pre-configured and loaded prior to shipping and installation,” said Billington. “There are four 42U racks in total at the venue, so there is a large amount of kit on site.”

Providing overall support for Billington throughout all stages of the project was MSL Director Darrel Olivier, while the programming and commissioning carried out onsite was done by Billington, Toby Jones, Greg McLenahan and Nathan Vedder from the MSL team. With the venue now operational, MSL provide remote support using remote monitoring of the AV network.

Jeremy Simmonds, co-CEO and co-founder of Swingers, concluded: “When we started designing a flagship Swingers to take over the enormous LIGHT nightclub space at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, it rapidly became clear that we were designing the best competitive socialising venue in the world.

“MSL were 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 momentum shows no sign of slowing down, with the company set to continue its expansion in other US cities and further afield.