Gracie’s Bar in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah promises and delivers something for everybody. It boasts two spacious patios and two floors of comfortable seating, along with a game room and a large, but wonderfully cozy bar. Utahans gather at Gracie’s to enjoy communal events, such as the Super Bowl or World Cup Soccer on twenty-two flat screens. The bar also brings in DJs and live music but its sound system was difficult to tame on such occasions.
Gracie’s recently contacted Salt Lake City’s Performance Audio to redesign and reconfigure the sound system. Levi Walker, systems manager at Performance Audio, relied on Ashly Audio’s new two-rack space pêma integrated DSP + amplifier to bring the sound system in line.
“In some respects, Gracie’s had too much stuff, and yet it wasn’t enough,” said Walker. “It was a hodgepodge of different gear that didn’t integrate very well. As a result, it was difficult to control. They wanted something simpler and more predictable.”
As is often the case, Gracie’s had financial constraints and limited space to dedicate to sound system hardware. The two-rack space Ashly pêma is ready-made for exactly such a circumstance, as it packs in a fully-featured Protea DSP and either four or eight amplifiers channels of either 125 or 250 watts each.
Walker simplified the speaker setup, replacing the odd eggs with Electro-Voice Evid 6.2 and 4.2 units in the more high profile locations. To improve coverage throughout, he added Atlas Sound FAP-series ceiling-mounted full-range loudspeakers and subwoofers.
The Ashly pêma 8250.70 delivers 250 watts to each of eight separate zones. Perhaps most significantly from the bar staff’s perspective, he gave them four Ashly WR-5 remote controls, which allow them to easily select inputs for the various zones and to easily adjust their volumes. In addition, he gave them an Archos wireless tablet that can control the system from anywhere, including the owner’s office.
“There’s really nothing else on the market that combines DSP and amplifier technology so powerfully or so compactly as the Ashly pêma,” said Walker. “The product is very easy to work with from an installation standpoint.”
“There are fewer things to connect and fewer pieces that can go wrong. And programming it was straightforward. I’m especially impressed that the pêma we installed delivers eight channels at 250 watts each. And it only takes up two rack spaces! It’s really the ideal solution for distributed audio in bars, restaurants, retail spaces, and the like.”
