Royal Ravintolat Oy is the largest private restaurant group in Finland, with over 70 restaurants throughout the country employing over 1000 staff nationwide. The group’s turnover in 2017 amounted to over 100 million euros. Sandro is one of the many brands owned by the Royal Ravintolat group; focusing on the rich flavours of Middle Eastern, North African, and Mediterranean cuisine, the latest Sandro restaurant occupies a prime location in Tampere’s newest shopping mall, Ratina. In keeping with the warm, vibrant colour scheme inspired by Sandro’s Eastern Mediterranean theme, Royal Ravintolat selected Genelec’s 4000 Series installation speakers in RAL ‘Pastel Turquoise’ to complement the interior design.
Royal Ravintolat turned to specialist electrical and AV contractors, HT-Teknocenter Oy based in Espoo, to install the new system. As one of Royal Ravintolat’s preferred suppliers, HT-Teknocentre is highly experienced in restaurant installations and already familiar with Genelec, so the Sandro installation was essentially very straightforward. “The only real challenge was time and the extremely tight project schedule,” explained HT-Teknocentre’s Hannu Mankki. “Other than that, it was easy. Genelec was a totally natural choice for the restaurant: firstly, they were already familiar with the brand having used it elsewhere within the group and been very satisfied; and secondly, Genelec offered them everything they wanted, namely excellent audio quality, superb customer service and of course the cherry on the cake was the ability to order the speakers in the special turquoise RAL colour to perfectly match their décor.”
It also helped that HT-Teknocentre were also familiar with Genelec, having used Genelec loudspeakers in several previous installations. “We are always pleased to work with Genelec,” confirmed Hannu. “Their products look good, sound good and, being active, are really easy to install. We don’t have to worry about finding somewhere to put an amp rack, or indeed running cabling for amplifiers, it’s just plug and play. I’ve never come across a customer yet who is unhappy with the sound quality, and if we need a hand with optimising the sound, Genelec is just a phone call away and they are always happy to help. The other issue that is important to us as integrators is reliability – we are practically never called back to a Genelec installation. Once it’s in and tuned, it will run for years and years. As far as we are concerned, Genelec was exactly the right choice for Sandro, especially with the RAL colour option.”
HT-Teknocentre installed a total of ten active, two-way 4030C installation loudspeakers in RAL 6034 ‘Pastel Turquoise’ supplemented by two active AIC25 in-ceiling speakers. “We went for the 4030C on this occasion because Sandro is a pretty big space with very high ceilings, so we needed the power of the 4030C rather than the smaller 4020C often used in restaurants, just to ensure that we could adequately fill the space with sound,” added Hannu. “The aim is to add ambience at low levels, but we still need to be able to hear the detail. However, as the speakers are all installed a long way above head height, the larger 4030C was the better choice to achieve our sound goals.”
Kenneth Granroth, project manager for Royal Ravintolat, is delighted with the results, but highlighted that the aesthetics were every bit as important as the sound quality for the Sandro project. “We already know that Genelec will give us exactly what we need in terms of audio quality, so we have no worries on that score,” he said. “What was important for us in the context of Sandro was making sure that the installation was compatible with our design objectives – essentially, the fact that we could order the speakers in pale turquoise to complement the deep turquoise walls and upholstery pretty much sealed the deal. It looks great and sounds fantastic. We’re all happy!”
