Martin Audio at The Newport

AUSTRALIA: Sydney-based restaurant, hotel, bar and wedding venue operator Merivale has recently added The Newport shore-side pub to its expanding portfolio. Upon taking over the venue, Merivale CEO Justin Hemmes and A/V manager Glenn Rayner sought to replace the sound system, opting for a Martin Audio setup comprising the CDD and MLA series. Technical director of the manufacturer’s Australian distributor Technical Audio Group, Anthony Russo, provided consultancy and assistance with the design, while the installation was carried out by Corporate Technology Services.

‘We looked at the existing audio at The Newport and quickly established that the only way we’d get the sort of clarity and coverage we required was to have lots of speakers,’ said Mr Rayner. More than 180 CDD coaxial loudspeakers were specified to negate any dead spots, following a shootout with several other loudspeaker brands.

‘It’s an enormous installation – the design process took months,’ explained Mr Rayner. ‘Because it’s coaxial you can install the speaker in a landscape or portrait orientation and you maintain the same highly coherent sound quality. What’s more, the dispersion pattern of the Martin Audio CDD design is intentionally non-symmetrical. It means there’s a wider dispersion pattern for those close to the speaker (say, around 120-degrees) and narrower for those more distant (around 80-degrees). The advantage of such an approach is a more consistent delivery of HF, regardless of the listening distance.’

The venue’s garden includes a stage and has been installed with speakers from the MLA range. Eight MLA Mini elements have been installed per side, with two MLA Mini subs. ‘We wanted to do something that no only sounded good but looked the part,’ Mr Rayner noted. ‘The Martin Audio array certainly looks like it’s meant to be there and looks a lot like a festival stage – which is what we were going for.’

With live music a regular fixture at The Newport, a portable rack that can be wheeled to the side of the stage has been equipped with a single Cat-5 connection for plugging into the MLA system. This has been set to pre-configure the different loudspeaker zones throughout the venue during a performance, with the 180 CDD loudspeakers serving as delays, the MLA PA system set to time zero.

‘Across every output and group of speakers we have EQ, compression, delay, HPF, LPF, DSP on every output; we’re not limited in any way,’ said Mr Rayner. ‘It means we can walk the venue with a Wi-Fi device and fine tune settings for every set of speakers. It took weeks to get right.

‘I’m looking forward to having streamed media available all the time, anywhere,’ he concluded. ‘It’s something we have in a more modest way but I can see it being widespread when it’s more cost effective and simpler to use.’

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