The London location of Sandbox VR, an entity with multiple venues in North America, Europe and Asia that offer teams of visitors futuristic virtual reality experience such as visiting original worlds, experiencing journeys to space and surviving zombie ambushes, is equipped with Martin Audio CDD and ADORN loudspeakers specified and installed by London-based Crossover.
Sandbox approached the AV specialists to fit out the three floors of the Post Building in London’s Covent Garden, a former Royal Mail Sorting Centre that had previously sat derelict for 20 years. Selection of the right products was paramount and careful consideration had to be given to the challenges around the acoustics and structure of the building.
Crossover specified several different audio-visual designs for the unique space, with digital signage driving pavement appeal and allowing updates of scheduled information and promotions. Inside, it’s the four Star Trek-inspired Holodecks, split over the two lower floors, that are the main area for VR participation. Each area houses a wall-mounted large-format display that provides information to the team about the room and mission that has been chosen. Here, audio and visual elements mesh together to enhance the visitor experience within a dynamic space.
Crossover senior system designer Juan Garcia explains that the client was seeking quality sound systems that could operate in both background and foreground applications. “We know from past experience that Martin Audio would be able to deliver the quality requirements within reasonable budgets,” he adds.
Fed by a combination of customer-profiled media player, iPod and DJ inputs, 14 CDD6WTX-WR loudspeakers are distributed across the multi-audio-zoned venue. This includes the Mezzanine Presentation Area, which serves as a multifunctional events space, where the audio system combines with a large projection screen, fed from an ultra-short throw projector. “We love the CDDs’ sound quality and reliability,” states Garcia.
“They provide a great base level of sound to work with,” adds Crossover commissioning engineer Lewis Spink. “The CDD range has been a good solution across projects, where you can achieve high coverage in areas with fewer speakers, as this minimizes phase relationship considerations. We’ve seen the speakers give consistent performance across a number of years in very tricky environments, with no massive discernible differences between new speakers and five-year-old speakers that have endured heavy usage. That’s really impressive, and excellent for us and our clients.”
In the main bar area, the CDD6s are joined by a pair of discreet Martin Audio slimline SX110 1 x 10in subwoofers in order to create more of a club feel. Since the venue is highly reverberant acoustically, with hard reflective surfaces exacerbated by the loud noise of excited customers, a warm, rich background audio system had been vital to preserve the sense of immersion. Therefore, Crossover worked carefully to manage the acoustics involved by not only careful selection of loudspeakers, but also through specification of appropriate acoustic panels that also enhance the overall “industrial” aesthetic of the interior design.
“Crossover did an amazing job deploying our AV requirements into the first Sandbox VR venue in Europe,” says Jake Wilmot-Sitwell, co-founder at VR Entertainment Group // Sandbox VR (UK & Ireland). As a result the integrators were engaged for the second Birmingham site, where they turned elsewhere in the Martin Audio portfolio to specify 10 of the ADORN ACP55T 5.25-inch pendant loudspeakers in a distributed system, along with four SX110 subwoofers.
Garcia concludes, “Since the Birmingham site had ceilings, we were able to mount from, and the power requirement was less, we knew the pendant ADORNS would be a perfect fit; at the same time we knew they would provide a very even coverage.”
