Covent Garden's high-glamour Kingly Club equipped with Omniline micro-arrays

The first UK installation of the OmniLine Micro Line Array from Martin Audio has been installed in the stunning new, three-storey, glass-fronted Kingly Club in London’s Covent Garden. The scalable system was specified by Bernard Mani, head of London integration company Systems Etc. The Kingly Club is the brainchild of entrepreneur Dezzi Mc Causland, founder and creator of the original award winning members club of the same name in Soho — on which Systems Etc also worked. The new operation in St Martin’s Lane consists of a contemporary Japanese restaurant, Kyashii, a lounge bar, a VIP mezzanine area and al fresco seating during the summer months. Overlooking the ground floor with a private bar, DJ and the largest floor to ceiling screens of any bar in Europe, the VIP mezzanine area offers fabulous views over the lounge bar and onto St Martin’s Lane. Downstairs, the restaurant comprises three dining rooms, the Blue Room, The White Room and the Chef’s Table. Providing even sound coverage provided a real challenge for Mani — although he already had experience of the space, since he had provided the sound system in the building’s earlier incarnation (as Denim). “This time, not only did we have to provide even distribution through three floors but the system needed to be tiny and discreet — in fact Dezzi wanted the components to be near-invisible.” It was important that the sound reinforcement blended in with the high-glamour design concept created by the owner himself, and architect Phillip Watts. Bernard Mani said he had investigated just about every product catalogue, but when he and Mc Causland visited Martin Audio’s High Wycombe HQ they knew they had found the answer. “He was completely sold on the looks,” says the installer. Thus the main system comprises seven hangs of four OmniLine boxes — some flown from the ceiling and some wall-mounted. Full range infills are provided by Martin Audio’s architecturally-designed white C115’s with 11 mounted to the wall, along with a combination of 17 distributed C4.8Ts and two C6.8T. ceiling speakers. Likewise the floor-mounted sub-woofers needed to be invisible and both the eight CS265’s on the ground floor and three AQ series AQ210 (2 x 10in subs) in the mezzanine have been concealed within the furniture carcassing. Special dispensation was made for the Martin Audio Blackline F10 which forms the DJ’s reference monitoring in the highly-specified booth — as this does have a strong muscular presence. In order to balance the levels of the source inputs — with different DJ and background music feeds — Systems Etc have used Martin Audio’s Engineer 418 DSP. Any containment issues have been dealt with by clever soundproofing — with added insulation and double-glazed skylights.