In with the new
Published: MEA
The new Pacha which has recently opened in Dubai is in a very familiar venue. The cylindrical building next to the entrance to the Madinat Jumeirah has been home to a number of different clubs over the years. And every time it has opened under a new guise, Pro Audio Middle East has been there to cover the new system.
The venue has traditionally been a challenging one acoustically, but some important structural and design changes with Pacha have minimised these historic issues. Gone is the domed ceiling in the main room, which is now part of the rooftop terrace. Gone are all the hard, reflective surfaces which have been replaced with soft, padded alternatives. It’s fair to say as Pro Audio Middle East returns to the venue, it is like walking into a completely different room.
Inside it has been completely refurbished, feeling bright and welcoming. Equally new is the audio solution covering the three floors of the venue. The preferred choice for Pacha was d&b audiotechnik. Everywhere you look, d&b V Series, Q Series and White Series speakers are on show providing a clear, clean sound to all of the various zones from the ground floor dancefloor to the rooftop terrace.
‘The shape of the building is difficult. We had to work a lot with the locations,’ says Lightbox Professional’s Amrith Verghese, who commissioned the system. ‘d&b is very controlled with its dispersion, which really helps. Even in some situations where I wouldn’t want to put a speaker, I was able to do that because of d&b.
‘Time and phase alignment is pretty critical for us,’ he continues. ‘The well-controlled dispersion pattern of the d&b speaker contributed to perfect alignment. This was particularly useful at the rooftop where we have multiple zones with no physical isolation between them.’
The system for first two floors is centred on the large Vi-Series V8 and V12 speakers covering the main dancefloor and Q-Subs providing extreme low-end coverage. The Q10 speakers that serve the VIP areas around the perimeter and the 12S cabinets by the main entrance have all been time aligned to this main solution. Equally up on the first floor, the same Q10 and 12S speakers plus additional 18S Subs have been installed to work with the main solution.
An offshoot of this first floor ring, the Red Room, provides clubbers with a completely different experience ‘In this room we have Qi1, Qi7s, Q10s with Qi subs and supported by 8s loudspeaker,’ says Mr Verghese. ‘The shape of the room was the only minor challenge here. But nothing that we couldn’t ring with just 1 EQ filter.
Venturing up from the first floor, the most challenging area for the project was the rooftop terrace. ‘The rooftop itself went through a number of revisions,’ reveals Mr Verghese. ‘Most of the time, in the winter, the open-air area will be the main dance floor but there is the covered dome area (which used to be the dome of the main room in previous iterations of the venue) which can be the dance floor in the warmer months,’ he explains. ‘Here on the rooftop we have Q7s, Q10s, 12S, with 18S Subs and Q Subs, 27S Subs (for the cardioid effect) and 10S speakers. The VIP areas have 8S and 12S speakers in an enclosed area, giving you that private experience.
‘This rooftop area is not meant to be loud because they have a hotel very close,’ continues Mr Verghese. ‘With the number of revisions we’ve been through, we now have a system that can go up fairly loud without disturbing the hotel guests. Just to be safe, once they have set what needs to be the limit here, we have installed a little reference mic. We have a Dateq SPL5 and an SPLD2 display, relaying and logging the history. It’s the kind of thing that should help the club.’
According to Mr Verghese, the d&b system didn’t require much processing. However, the three Symetrix Radius AEC processors and the SymNet xOut 12s have been vital components. ‘These are very powerful processors but in this project, their main role is input selection and zone control.’ The main club, Red Room and rooftop each have their own Radius to provide audio processing. These are located in the rooftop and ground floor rack rooms and all connected via Ethernet cables. While this was the first time Mr Verghese has used the product, he has clearly been impressed with its capabilities.
‘When I came here I started using it. It has a lot of processing power and it’s really user-friendly,’ he reports. ‘Right now, this particular Symetrix is linked with the one on the ground floor, they are all on the same Wi-Fi network so I just have to control it through a browser. All the zone controls are within the Symetrix.’
Joining the Symetrix processors in the two rack rooms are a wall of d&b amplifiers. ‘Where ever we expect it to go really loud, we’ve used the D12 amplifiers, the rest of them are D6,’ says Mr Verghese. ‘The entire ground floor is D12. The Red Room is partly D12 and a few of the fill speakers have D6.’
Pacha Ibiza Dubai, has been a very high profile project for all concerned. As such, there was major involvement from Ralf Koehler from d&b Germany and his design team, along with Juanma DeCasas from d&b’s Barcelona office. Following this, the designs were overseen by Pacha Ibiza. These were then fine-tuned in Dubai by Chadi El Masri and Amrith Verghese of Lightbox Professional, who are the distributors for d&b audiotechnik in the region. ‘We conducted quite a few workshops and meetings with the Pierre Ravan, entertainment director for Pacha Dubai and Tony Mattar of Cornerstone Technologies who are the installation partner for Lightbox,’ says Mr Verghese. ‘These local workshops with the local team in Dubai helped us to tweak and finalise the designs created by the team in Germany and Spain.
‘I’m quite proud of the final outcome.The project was well executed by our install partner Cornerstone Technologies coordinating with the onsite General Contractor AMBB,’ continues Mr Verghese. ‘And finally when I switched on the system for people from the club to walk around and listen to, they were all smiles and “Thumbs-up”,’ he smiles. ‘d&b helps me get this response everytime.’