Controlled low

At 6.5m tall and painted bright white, the bass towers at the Eden Beach Club are hard to miss. With one cylindrical and one oblong tower rising up either side of the main bar they form the dominant feature defining the lounge area of the beach club. But the bass towers are about more than imposing visuals.

‘Inside the steel towers, you have eight Axys B07 subwoofers either side. These allow a cardioid propagation of the sound, decreasing the amount of volume that goes to the back of those towers,’ explains Ramy Estephan, Dubai office representative for 21dB Acoustic Solutions, the company responsible for the installation. ‘The towers are pointed in a direction where there are not a lot of buildings and facing away from the Palm.’

This is a key factor. Located at the very tip of Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah at the Rixos Beach Hotel, Eden is in one of the Emirate’s most prestigious locations. Added to this, the beach section faces towards the centre of the Palm while the lounge faces away into the Gulf. So as the sound in the lounge gets turned up to club levels for Friday night parties, any audio leaking from the rear of the venue is heading directly for some prime real estate.

‘The Axys subwoofers will allow us to control where the bass is going, directivity is key with Axys,’ continues Mr Estephan. ‘We initially installed the subs without the towers, using four either side as well as a further eight at the rear of the lounge in an omnidirectional setup. But there were complaints from the apartments and villas on the Palm. With the cardioid setup of the towers we made sure there was less propagation going towards the back. This was the main reason we went with the Axys speakers. It meant we would be able to control the propagation.’

Of course, there is more to the towers than control. ‘The two towers are either side of the bar and angled towards the centre to make sure this place explodes on a Friday, which is what the client wants,’ smiles Mr Estephan. ‘The towers give us a bigger punch and no delay issues.’

The bass towers form a core portion of the main system, but they only really get put to their full use on a Friday night when the preset on the venue’s two XTA DP426 processors is set to ‘Party’. Outside of this, they purely provide gentle low end reinforcement for a relaxed lounge system.
This is one of the secrets of Eden. It has three distinct sound systems which each serve a different purpose and are provided by three different brands.

‘The main installation is Axys speakers. Alongside the B07 subs there are U14 powered speakers,’ says Mr Estephan. ‘The U14s are all installed in the lounge area, the main party area. There are 53 of them, so you have a speaker installed every few metres. It’s a lounge vibe and they don’t have to go too loud. It’s a very compact place, it’s not very big but at the same time there are a lot of speakers.
‘Aside from that, there is a FOH left and right setup from the DJ which are JBL speakers,’ he continues. ‘There are hangs of four Vertec 4886 with a 4883 subwoofer each side. It’s extremely loud and you have to compensate for it being an open air venue so a lot of power is being generated out of those amplifiers to reach the club feel in an outdoor setting.’

It was this part of the install which caused the biggest challenge for 21dB. ‘Initially, they didn’t want a front of house system, they were concerned with hitting the hotel so we decided on the U14s,’ recalls Mr Estephan. ‘Then as there were no complaints, they decided to push it further for a proper party. That was after the design, so we got in contact with the local Harman distributor, GSL Professional, to add the JBL system for a bit more punch in the centre. If you want to treat it as a club, you need to have a front of house,’ he reasons.

‘The fact that we had to go back and try to account for a front of house when the initial design didn’t include one was a bit tricky,’ he continues. ‘We were fortunate with the structure of the venue. The FOH system wasn’t in the original plans, but the style of the bar allowed us to hang them. The technical room was already setup so the amplifiers ended up being there. It was much easier than pulling speaker cables. It was better to have just one signal cable and the amplifiers over there.’

Moving out of the lounge and beyond the restaurant, which is again covered by a separately controlled U14 system, takes you to the third component of the venue – its beach. This again features its own distinct solution, but this time from Italian manufacturer Architettura Sonora.

‘We’ve used Sphere’s from the AS collection and Cylinders from the VD line. They don’t look like boxes, they blend in well with the layout of the place and they look really nice,’ says Mr Estephan. ‘The AS speakers are really good and they cover the beach nicely. There are lots of Sphere speakers and we have used different delay settings between the lounge and the beach so that there are no delay issues.

‘The Dynacord DSA 8805 and DSA 8410 amplifiers are in the technical room so we have done long cable runs down to the beach,’ he continues. ‘They cannot go as loud as if you had the amplifier right next to them, but that is not what you want in this environment, you want it to be relaxed.
‘It’s a smooth transition walking between the different areas. We had to do a lot of mixing and a lot of work on the XTA to achieve that,’ continues Mr Estephan. ‘We had to make sure there were the right delays and the right levels for each preset. The rest of the work is them knowing when to switch those presets.’

As Mr Estephan suggests, the XTA portion of the installation was essential. The work done here by 21dB allows Eden’s non-technical staff to change the atmosphere in the venue by selecting the appropriate preset.

‘We have different presets for different times. They have their biggest party on Fridays, they bring in a DJ or an international act every week, so that’s when all the speakers are turned on. Otherwise the JBL speakers are turned off,’ explains Mr Estephan. ‘During the day, the action is mainly on the beach so we made a preset where it’s mostly the AS speakers working with a low level in the lounge. During the evenings on any other night except Fridays you have just the Axys speakers working in the lounge and the beach turned off as people aren’t using it. The guys go into the technical room and change the presets on the XTA processors so it’s very easy for them to use.’

The end result is one Mr Estephan is clearly proud of. ‘It’s been a very nice project, there haven’t been any issues. I’m happy with how it sounds. It’s very even when you walk around,’ he reflects. ‘It is a nice reference project for 21dB in Dubai.’

Controlling low end may have been the starting point for this project, but with the different uses and settings, it has become more like total control. The sound at Eden, just like the bass towers, can be imposing, but thanks to the technology employed by 21dB, it doesn’t have to be.

www.21db.org