After more than 12 years of growth in West Kendall, FL, Chef Adrianne Calvo, the owner and manager of Chef Adrianne’s Vineyard Restaurant & Wine Bar, decided it was time to move to a larger, more customized location that’s been equipped with a multi-zone audio system driven by power amplifiers from LEA Professional.
An existing 8,000-square-foot restaurant space in nearby Miami, now renovated, serves as the new site, offering a large indoor dining area, two private dining rooms, and a social-distance-friendly terrace outfitted with a large retractable projection screen and other AV tools throughout to accommodate special events. The building offers tall ceilings and wide-open spaces, and can accommodate 270 patrons.
With audio support playing an essential part of the restaurant experience, For the audio portion of the project, Calvo worked with Ivan Sotomayor, President and Owner of ISF Enterprises, a south Florida-based integration firm that focuses on restaurant, club, retail, and multi-use facilities.
“This installation was fun but also a bit challenging,” says Sotomayor. “There are multiple indoor audio zones we need to control, and outdoors, the facility is next to a waterway, so we needed an appropriate volume level and control for optimum sound quality and intelligibility for music as well as presentations, and they even needed surround-sound capabilities outdoors.”
The audio team utilized EASE modeling to help map out the number, size, and location of the loudspeakers to best cover the facility. “A restaurant of this size can use a lot of audio zones, requiring many separate audio feeds,” Sotomayor notes. “They even have unique audio zones in the entrance area where patrons wait for seating, and we added sound to the kitchen and chef area back of house.”
It was determined that the sound system required 10 zones to appropriately cover the restaurant, all powered by three Connect 354 IoT-enabled amplifiers from LEA Professional. Available in two, four, and eight-channel version, they offer direct HiZ (70- or 100-volt) or LoZ that’s selectable by channel.
Further, integrators can engage the built-in Wi-Fi access point, connect to the venue’s Wi-Fi, or use the FAST Ethernet to connect to any local area network via Cat-5/6. The Network Connect Series offers Cloud connectivity for remote control, monitoring, notifications, and more from any personal devices.
“The three LEA amps give us 12 channels of power, so we have a little growing room. We’re using a 70-volt system over the entire place with Sonance speakers throughout, and it’s worked out nicely,” says Sotomayor. “We were recommended the LEA amps, I had not worked with them before, but now that we’ve had a chance to hear them and see how they operate, we use the DSP to really make the sound perfect in each of the individual zones. They are great amps that I will use for more installations for sure.”
Sotomayor adds that he and his team are looking forward to fully working with the amplifiers’ connectivity to be able to troubleshoot or tweak system parameters remotely at any time. “As we all know, nothing happens during regular business hours, so the remote connectivity is a huge benefit for us,” he concludes. “If we need to mute channels, adjust settings, or even pro-actively look at the system to make sure all is good. And if there is an issue, we can make a fix and never need to roll a truck, and the customer is back on-line in a matter of a couple of minutes, not hours.”
