Roxy Ball Room falls under the umbrella organisation ‘Roxy Leisure Ltd’, which is responsible for the entirety of the Roxy estate and also owns a number of bars across Leeds and the north of the UK. The venues allow customers to get involved with table tennis, pool, and beer pong alongside enjoying a game of bowling under the watchful eye of Birmingham-born legend, Ozzy Osbourne, graffitied on the brick walls by Roxy’s resident artist, Eject. Spearheaded by brothers Matt and Ben Jones, Roxy Ball Room has provided the UK with the next big nightlife opportunity, combining nostalgic 90s games with the euphoria of a bustling night out.
To achieve the desired audio vision for the Birmingham venue, Roxy Ball Room sought help from Leeds-based audio integrator, Audioserv. The installation company already had a strong relationship with the venue owners, as it had carried out work across the sites in Liverpool and Manchester previously, so it was confident to take on yet another one of its projects.
“We knew how the client liked their venues to work,” explained Pete Rollinson, Director at Audioserv. “The Birmingham venue needed the audio confined to specific spaces like the rest of the Roxy venues, so we designed the systems to give fairly consistent coverage across the whole space, but with more impact in certain areas of the venue.”
The system in the venue is firing in one direction, this is from the back, upstairs part of the ballroom, towards the end of the bowling lanes. Audioserv chose a system comprising Turbosound, Powersoft and Audac products to ensure the sound was capable of adhering to a variety of settings that brought the venue to life. Using Turbosound also meant that Audioserv was able to play with a range of loudspeaker sizes to integrate into the installation. “There are five Turbosound TCS122 loudspeaker cabinets, mounted horizontally to the back wall upstairs. These are complimented by two Turbosound NuQ118b subwoofers. This area doesn’t need to be as loud as the lower part of the bar. It would have been tempting to use smaller boxes, but they would have started to sound thin in such a large volume of space,” said Pete. “The TCS122 tops used have a dendritic waveguide, and, in a space as large as this one, it was really important to us to be able to control where the sound was focussed to avoid unwanted reflections. The high-frequency waveguides allowed our installation team to really control where we could minimise reverb.”
Underneath the mezzanine, there is a line of 10 Turbosound NuQ82 loudspeakers mounted above the bar. “These cover the area directly in front of the bar,” Pete added. “There is another line of five Turbosound TCS122 mid-high loudspeakers mounted horizontally onto the bulkhead at the front of the mezzanine. Again, they are paired with two NuQ118b subwoofers. This part of the system covers the area between the bar area and the bowling lanes, but the subwoofers also provide the low end for the bar. They are very close to each other, so the difference in time alignment isn’t noticeable for the subwoofers located in the bar area. The rest of the system is time aligned correctly and wherever you stand it is coherent and sounds great, whether it is AC/DC or house music playing. There is also an Audac Ateo 4 loudspeaker in each of the toilets. They, too, have some time alignment on them, to make the transition of walking to the toilets less noticeable.”
The venue also uses Powersoft’s Quattrocanali 4804 amplifiers, which are conveniently tailored to small-to-medium installation projects, offering amazing sound quality and reliability. “As a hire company, we have been using Powersoft amplifiers for years and are very familiar with them. In many of our installations, we use multiple channels of audio for either the number of loudspeakers we use, or the amount of different time alignment delays. Having a huge number of channels of conventional amplifiers would take up a massive amount of room in what is usually a very small office. We have supplied amplifiers from Powersoft’s installation range to Roxy Ball Room on different projects before, as well as a number of other clients. They sound excellent, they are extremely small physically and their power consumption is exceptionally low, which translates into not needing air conditioning for the staff in the office where the audio and network equipment is usually sited,” furthered Pete.
Audioserv also selected a Symetrix Solus 8×8 unit for the processing within the venue, as the venue didn’t require any more than eight channels. Symetrix allows venues to treat the different areas like individual sound systems, but with the zoning capability to provide the relevant control to staff and managers in venues such as bars and restaurants.
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