ADLIB Audio has completed a unique and stylish sound installation, seamlessly blending art, science, acoustics and aesthetics at Panacea in John Dalton Street, Manchester.
Panacea is Manchester’s latest stylish, cool, hip and friendly environment in which to eat, drink, dance and be social. Pretension is out, perfection is in at this high profile venue, the brainchild of one of the City’s smartest young local party people and entrepreneurs, Joe Akka.
Panacea is Akka’s new flagship venue ? the first of a selected roll out. It’s a new concept in promoting non exclusive sophistication and relaxation without being exclusive or affected ? a discreet, contemporary environment for pan dimensional social interaction.
Naturally, superlative acoustics was seen as absolutely crucial to creating Panacea’s essential atmosphere, and to everyone’s enjoyment of the space. Akka contacted ADLIB Audio’s Andy Dockerty via recommendation from Kennedy Street Enterprises, and asked him to design an appropriate system ? keeping the speakers as invisible as possible.
Dockerty ? renowned for his attention to detail and quality ? knew exactly the type of sonic vibes Akka needed at Panacea.
Embedded Audio
He and the ADLIB team - including Dave Fletcher, who produced all the cabinet work - set to work to design, specify and built a tailor-made system for Panacea. This involved embedding four speakers into each of Panacea’s structural pillars with a minimal extrusion to ensure the preservation and integrity of the interior design.
Dockerty collaborated closely with designer Bernard Carroll throughout. ADLIB had also worked with him on the Mosquito Club in Liverpool and so a good dialogue existed between the two as well as a mutual respect for what their departments needed to achieve.
“The biggest issues we had were to produce even coverage at various listening levels and finding the audio solutions with the designers structural limitations was a massive challenge.”
Initially, ADLIB supplied several samples of paintwork for the speaker grills to ensure an exact colour match and no degradation of the audio. Minute details included no bagding on the speaker grills and event white foam behind them. Each of the four speakers had to be literally manufactured inside each pillar. Carroll insisted there was no angle at all on the parts of the speakers protruding from the pillars, which made focussing the sound, particularly the mid-highs - interesting.
ADLIB solved this by building the compression drivers into the cabinet’s wooden housing, angled at 15 degrees downwards and on a pivot. This pivot allowed the drivers to be angled up to 40 degrees in each direction. The best angles were then selected when commissioning the system, to provide a smooth dispersion around the long, low ceilinged room.
Cool Concept
There’s a total of 35 ADLIB AA61 speaker enclosures and 6 AA 15BP flat subs, the latter all dug into the floor below the seating, plus one dual hybrid version of the sub fitted under the stairs. There’s also a single 12” sub ensconced in the ceiling.
Panacea is divided into 3 audio zones ? the bar, restaurant and the booth seating, and there’s three separate remote volume controls that can be operated by the managers. Dockerty also specified a Soundweb ‘Jellyfish’ controller at the DJ booth position, which is primarily for Joe Akka to insert his own specific programmes.
The system is powered by Crown CE Series amplifiers. The background music source is a C-Burn MP3 system, and ADLIB also supplied the full DJ a set up, including Pioneer CDJ 1000s, and Allen & Heath Xone 62 mixer and Technics 1210 dex.
Akka says, “ADLIB were fantastic. They listened to what I needed, assessed the room thoroughly, worked alongside all others involved in the project, and delivered exactly the right system with exactly the right attitude. Their approach was scientific, they were helpful at every juncture and paid meticulous attention to detail.”