SCHAUMBURG, IL —With three other clubs in Chicago’s Wrigleyville and Lincoln Park suburbs, the owners of the new John Barleycorn here wanted to take things up a few notches. The club/bar/restaurant combo offers dining and drinking on the first floor and a club/live sound venue upstairs.
Local installer Sound & Lighting Designs equipped the new-build venue, which occupies 20,000 square feet, with audio, video, stage and club lighting and surveillance gear.
When it came to the choice of speakers, owners Sam Sanchez and Michael Gonzalez were very much involved. As S&L owner Timothy Pickett said, “We shopped several brands and went to a Martin Audio demo, and the sound system just blew everybody away. Once the owners heard the speakers, they told me, ‘this is what we want. Buy it.’”
The sound system on the first floor is designed to provide quality audio without overwhelming the patrons. As Pickett noted, “You come in the main entrance on the first floor and there’s a big bar area on the left with 16 Samsung plasmas and 8 Martin Audio AQ8s throughout the room and two AQ212 subs in the corners. The levels run a bit higher at the bar, but it sounds great.
“On the right,” Pickett continued, “is the dining area with seating and 16 more Samsung plasmas. We needed clarity and balanced reproduction without a lot of volume, so we put in 16 Martin Audio 8.1T Ceiling Series speakers in four rows of four, along with four AQ112 subs built in under the seating booths.”
Across from the entrance, a large grand staircase leads upstairs. The staircase opens into another large room on the second floor with a 25 foot by 12 foot stage. Three main bars with seating and booths surround the stage with facilities to host up to 1,000 people.
The stage is used for live performances by bands and DJs. “We have three Martin Audio W8LM arrays, four each left and right, and three center above the stage, with the right and left stacks tilted out at 30º angles and the center array straight at the crowd,” Pickett said.
“We chose W8LMs because they have such a wide horizontal throw and the room is a rectangle with the stage at the short end, so we needed something with real wide coverage. There are six WLX subs under the stage side by side coupled together, so there’s a stack for every array.”
The rest of the system consists of Crown amplification, an Allen & Heath GL2800 mixer, Klark Teknik, dbx and BSS processing, DWR-21 and ER-35 racks from Middle Atlantic Products, Shure and Sennheiser mics.
“Everybody’s impressed with the sound,” Pickett said. “All the DJs tell us it’s the best system they’ve ever played on. We get great reviews from bands and DJs; they say a lot of good things. They love the clarity and intelligibility of the sound plus the volume we can generate with the Martins.”
For more information, please visit www.martin-audio.com.
