Following a successful installation at La Grande Boucherie in Midtown Manhattan last year, the Brooklyn-based office of Bond Applied Technology has again installed Martin Audio CDD loudspeakers series in a new boutique Mexican restaurant called Casa Carmen in the TriBeCa district of Lower Manhattan.
Collaborating with interior designer Julien Legeard (of Legeard Studio) — as at La Grande Boucherie — Bond director Christopher Mayes-Wright adopted the coaxial differential dispersion technology in deploying 10 compact CCD6 enclosures joined by four concealed SX110 subwoofers. “My experience with CDD speakers has been nothing but amazing every time,” Mayes-Wright says. “I’ve been able to compare them in situ with other similar speakers and the clarity and accuracy of imaging and voicing is noticeably miles better.
“Some folks think this is irrelevant in an installation environment where there are so many factors affecting acoustic performance—asymmetrical rooms, a mixture of often highly reflective materials such as tiles and glass,” he continues. “But I believe that in these circumstances it’s even more important to have a perfectly tight and controlled sound coming from your loudspeakers, to avoid what I call the ‘shopping mall effect’, which you find in lots of spaces where the sound comes from above. What tends to happen is that the sound energy just floats around untamed in a vast layer above the heads of the customer, and sounds like never ending clatter. The clarity of CDDs is one giant leap towards avoiding that scenario.”
The restaurant represents the first U.S. opening by a family of restaurateurs from Mexico City. The name “Carmen” is a homage to the family matriarch and celebrated Mexican cook Carmen ‘Titita’ Ramirez Degollado, and it is being run by her grandsons Santiago and Sebastian Ramirez Degollado.
The brief had been clear—the system needed to sound good and fill the room but at the same time allow regular conversation to take place. “The room acoustics help with this,” notes the installer. “There’s a layer of absorption on the ceiling and the natural wood and stucco surfaces help with diffusion of high frequencies. I’m a big fan of running a powerful system at below 35 percent of its potential. This keeps distortion to an absolute minimum and also extends the life of the equipment.”
Sound playback is provided by a multi-zone Sonos system, with SX110s enclosed in the cabinetry by the bar and inside the walls in the dining area, and in all cases, they’re isolated with 3/4-inch rubber sheeting to prevent acoustic transmission. Correct mounting of the full-range CDDs—in this instance on the ceiling 16 feet off the floor using custom Unistrut frames—was also critical to achieving even dispersion. Clever preparation enabled them to be positioned between the beams.
Despite the presence of a third-party processor, the CDDs were able to be run pretty much straight out of the box. “I didn’t do much more than enter the manufacturer-recommended EQ settings for the CDD6s, cross over the subs and do some overall tweaks after a walk-through the space with diners present,” Mayes-Wright concludes. “The clients are super happy. I went to dinner with friends at Casa Carmen shortly after it opened and experienced the sound on a busy night. The fact that everyone said how clear and controlled the sound was really made my day.”
