Rooms
Sound systems for bars and restaurants
A dining room has to carry music and still let two people at the same table hear each other.
The problem with sound in a dining room
Music and conversation are competing for the same room, and the room usually only has one setting. Turn it up for the bar and the far booths give up talking. Turn it down for the booths and the bar feels dead. Nobody wins, and the staff end up adjusting a single volume knob all night trying to split the difference.
Then there is spill. Sound that was meant for the dining room ends up in the kitchen, on the patio, and through the wall into whoever is next door. That is not a volume problem, it is a coverage and zoning problem, and no amount of turning things down fixes it without also killing the room.
How we approach it
A main system for the room that needs presence, and distributed zones for the rooms that need intelligibility — each zone with its own level control, so the bar, the dining room, the patio and the back room are not arguing over one fader.
Speakers get placed for coverage rather than symmetry, and everything gets rigged back to real structure. In a finished restaurant that usually means coordinating with the furniture plan and the ceiling before anything is ordered, not after.
Distributed audio and zone control
Zone control is the part that makes a restaurant system survive contact with a real shift. Staff should be able to turn the patio down without touching the dining room, and should not need to understand the system to do it. That means simple, labelled controls in the places the people using them actually stand.
It also means the system has to make sense to somebody who was not there when it was installed. Presets, labels and documentation are part of the handover, not an extra.
Icehouse and Animales BBQ Co.
At Icehouse we hung an L-Acoustics rig on a new steel I-beam and put distributed speakers through the rest of the venue, each with its own volume control. The room now books national touring acts — the system stopped being the limiting factor on what they could take.
Animales BBQ Co. was ours end to end: a pure design-build in a room that did not exist yet, covering stage lighting, house dimming, video distribution, distributed audio, acoustic treatment and a room-dividing curtain. It gets loud and stays clear, which is the whole trick in a restaurant with a stage in it.
Questions we get asked
Can we control zones from behind the bar? Yes, and that is usually where the control belongs. We put simple level control in the places staff actually stand, labelled in plain language.
Will it bother the neighbours? Controlling spill is a design decision made before anything is hung — speaker placement, pattern control and zoning. If you have a shared wall or a patio near residential, tell us at the site walk and it shapes the design.
Can you work around service? Yes. Most restaurant work happens on closed days and overnights. We would rather plan that into the schedule than surprise you with it.
Do we need to close to have this installed? Rarely for a retrofit. For a build-out we are coordinating with the general contractor’s schedule anyway.
Can the same system handle a band and a Tuesday lunch? That is exactly what zoning is for. The stage system and the distributed system get designed together so the room can be two different rooms.
Related
Tell us about the room.
Send over the venue, the date and roughly what you need. We read every request and reply with real questions, not a form letter.