Live music venue fabric London in England recently extended its relationship with Martin Audio that dates back nearly a quarter of a century by announcing a substantial system upgrade to its flagship Room 1 with an overhaul of the facility’s existing 20-year-old W8L line arrays, the addition of new subwoofers, and more.
Since the installation of W8C, Blackline loudspeakers and WSX subwoofers at the start of the new millennium, the club has gone through several generations of Martin Audio systems. But when it came to the latest refresh, technical manager Matt Smith decided to follow a different path. Concerned about the prospect of losing what he describes as “that distinctive Room 1 sound,” he asked the manufacturer if it would overhaul the existing line arrays by fitting them with new drivers.
However, there was a journey before that decision was reached that involved auditioning several different brands. “Although they all sounded amazing it was just going to change the character of what the room was about,” Smith says. He adds that it had been fabric founder Keith Reilly who had endorsed the original switch to Martin Audio “and that there was a romanticism about this system.”
In addition, he consulted the club’s inner pool of promoters, DJs and sound engineers, along with his in-house team: “they were unanimous that we should renovate in order to retain the signature Martin Audio sound and preserve what is quite a historic installation.”
The re-energized mid-tops are joined by SHX218 dual 18-inch subwoofers, iKON multi-channel DSP amplifiers, new FlexPoint loudspeakers and XE300 stage monitors. At the same time, Blackline F12 loudspeakers have been re-purposed to deliver reference sound up in the DJ booth.
The new Room 1 layout offers the familiar sight of the four newly powder-coated four W8L elements, two left and right on the stage, matched with repurposed W8C units, two left and right at the back. Meanwhile, providing design support for time alignment of the new subwoofer arrays were Martin Audio’s technical support team of Dan Orton, Ben Tucker and Paul Connaughton.
Ten iKON amplifiers (nine iK42s run the bulk of the system, with a single iK81 driving the MF/HF of the main enclosures). The club’s original DSP and networking had been entrusted to the Soundweb environment but the DSP for the sub array, along with delay times and all presets have now transferred to the process-controlled iKONs.
“The amps are immensely powerful,” notes Smith, “and I think we would do some structural damage if we turned them up to their max.
“It’s nice because we are just ticking over with our outputs on the amps whereas before we would have physically needed to constantly check [our amps] just before peak. The beauty of the iKONs is that they self-monitor and with the processing now taking place in the iKONs, we can monitor them remotely via [Martin Audio’s] VU-NET software.”
