Meeting customer demand
Published: ASIA
Mumbai’s Aurus nightclub was never intended for dance music, but when its customers demanded a change in sound system, it had to react, as Shekhar Kusuma reports
When you consider that Mumbai is known around the world as a destination of choice for people who enjoy a vibrant nightlife, it’s perhaps surprising that one of its premium venues was never meant to have a dance floor, let alone an audio system capable of serving one.
Yet Aurus, arguably one of the city’s best known nightclubs cum restaurants and a regular haunt of celebrities ranging from rich and famous socialites, to film and television stars and even sporting heroes, falls into exactly this category. What’s even more startling however, is the fact that its customers created one anyway, leaving the venue’s management in the odd position of retroactively installing a sound system to match.
Indeed, Aurus – an award winning venue located on the road heading to Juhu beach in Mumbai’s bustling suburbs – was originally conceived as a lavishly furnished lounge club, with suitably laid-back music to match. Boasting Balinese inspired gazebos and four poster beds on its beach front terrace, the venue comes to life on Friday nights as the gentle sound of waves from the Arabian sea, the potent aroma of the sea breeze and the sight of the fading sunlight on water gives way to a thriving clientele bustling within the huge, glass-walled portioned space which houses the main bar counter, the DJ cabin and, at least now, the dance floor.
Since November 2009, that dance floor has been served by a Meyer Sound installation provided by the manufacturer’s local distributor Groove Temple, with regular DJ MMat presenting his ‘Bhavisayvani Future soundz collective’, pounding party-goers with electronic trance, house and dance music sets.
In the first months of Aurus’ life, however, the sound system was a far more restrained proposition, consisting of a powered install with 16 evenly scattered dual 6-inch woofers with 1-inch tweeters. No subwoofers had been included in the original specification for the venue, as its management was convinced that its policy of playing only laid-back lounge music required no extra low-end. Its customers, however, had very different ideas, claiming the space between the DJ position and the bar as their own. Aurus was swiftly transformed into a harder-edged venue with a conventional weekend dance-floor, and the search for a more suitable audio installation was on.
Not surprisingly, the search didn’t last long. In a city as active as Mumbai, high-profile venues such as Aurus stand a very potent threat of losing custom to competing establishments. The venue’s inadequate audio installation was already drawing negative reactions from patrons, and hiring in more heavy-duty systems to plug the performance gap on a weekly basis was a costly and impractical solution. Instead the club’s management turned to Groove Temple to provide a system capable of delivering more suitable coverage, and the Meyer Sound installation soon followed.
Just the reputation afforded to Groove Temple must have provided significant comfort to the venue’s management. Kaveer Shahani’s company has consulted on, and later executed, many club installations within Mumbai and beyond, including five Hard Rock Cafes, while its position as the distributor for Meyer Sound within western India affords it no small cachet. Indeed, it was the reputation that Meyer Sound enjoys which ultimately won Groove Temple the contract for retrofitting Aurus. Few loudspeaker brands carry the marquee value of John Meyer’s cabinets, and in a venue where the clientele expects the best of everything, brand value counts for a great deal.
Having already surveyed the club on his occasional social visits prior to the official meeting, Mr Shahani suggested Meyer UPJ-1P Compact Vario loudspeakers alongside 600-HP compact high power subs to deliver the kind of performance that Aurus’ customers were demanding. But another problem quickly presented itself - as there was no official dance floor within the venue, no space had been allocated for the speakers in the club’s original architectural or interior design.
It was a serious problem to overcome. Measuring 283mm wide, 570mm in height and boasting a depth of 311mm, the UPJ-1P carries a 10-inch low-frequency neodymium magnet cone driver and a 0.75-inch exit, plus a 3-inch diaphragm compression driver in its high-frequency section. It’s a difficult box to miss when not catered for in a venue’s design. The 600-HP is more visible still, featuring two specially designed high-power 15-inch, high-excursion, back-vented cone drivers boasting 4-inch voice coils, each rated to handle 1.2kW.
To counter the problem, Mr Shahani - in consultation with his engineer Shane D’souza - decided to horizontally mount the two UPJ-1P cabinets per side, right behind the DJ’s cabin, with the 600-HP compact sub on the floor below. The low frequency output was maximised up to +18db by double stacking the dual subs in a corner, resulting in triple space loading. The Groove Temple tech team also made use of the flexibility offered by the UJP-1P to target the dance floor by turning the two top Vario- rotatable horns by 45-degrees flown over the DJ’s position.
If the process of selecting the correct system was quick, however, then it was nothing at all compared to the speed with which it was actually installed. The entire process of installation and tuning was completed in just six hours, with a separate day assigned for fine-tuning if necessary. A proprietary Meyer Sound Line Driver LD-2 was used to drive the loudspeakers.
Following six hours of work, Groove Temple had transformed Aurus from a venue with huge potential and an exciting guest-list, to a fully-fledged nightclub capable of doing justice to the sets that DJ MMat has become known for. The lounge-club design remains intact, as does the exclusivity of its patrons, but crucially, the club is no longer facing the weekly trial of comparing hired-in sound systems, or the threat of its customers moving elsewhere.
Indeed, the success of the system can arguably be measured in the reaction of the nightclubs with which Aurus competes. Having begun life as the lounge club where no one could dance but everyone wanted to, Aurus has become the envy of its neighbours, with DJ MMat and the Bhavisayvani Future soundz collective spreading the word about the venue’s new Meyer sound system.