The Observatory North Park in San Diego has quickly gained recognition for both the eclectic assortment of well-known and up-and-coming bands that it hosts as well as the quality of their sound reinforcement.
The new Adamson S10 line array was recently designed and installed by Sound Image, located in nearby Escondido, CA.
The Observatory North Park is located in a building that opened as a movie theater in 1929 and has continued to be an entertainment venue since then. The current owners took over the 1200-capacity space in 2015.
“The previous owners had a similar idea with the room but failed,” explains Garrett Wysocki, audio manager at The Observatory. “The sound system they had in here was seriously under powered. Customers and bands were constantly complaining. One of the first things we did was start checking out reputable systems that would provide the quality and coverage the bands and customers demand.”
One of the people Wysocki reached out to was Jesse Adamson, director of business development at nearby Sound Image. Sound Image ultimately demonstrated two systems at The Observatory, one of which was the new S10 line array from Adamson.
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“I wanted quality and coverage,” he explains. “When I heard the S10 I knew we had the solution. The sound was amazing and the coverage is incredible. There is not a bad seat in the house.”
Sound Image and the Adamson support team worked with Wysocki and Ryan Blank, The Observatory operations manager, to put together a system that would be flexible enough to handle the variety of music genres performed at The Observatory and accepted by the level of artist that the talent buyer attracts. The final system consisted of left-right arrays made up of eight S10 enclosures each and eight E119 subwoofers ground stacked, four per side.
The S10 is a 2-way, full range line array enclosure ideal for venues like The Observatory. Loaded with two newly designed 10-inch ND10-LM Kevlar Neodymium low frequency drivers and an NH4TA2 1.5-inch exit high frequency compression driver, the enclosure features a wave shaping sound chamber that produces a slightly curved wavefront with a nominal dispersion pattern of 110° x 10° (H x V). The system is powered by three Lab.gruppen PLM 10000Q and one PLM 20000Q amplifiers equipped with Lake processing.
“When the owners purchased the building it was with the intention of turning the space into the best live music venue in San Diego,” concludes Wysocki. “So far, so good. We’re ticking off everyone else in town with sold out shows and a reputation for the best PA in the area.”
