- The Saddle Up Saloon and Dancehall, headquartered near Chicago in Aurora, IL, recently expanded its operation, opening a second location in Indianapolis, IN. Located near the Castleton Square Mall, close to Indianapolis Metropolitan Airport, the new 13,440-sq.-ft. venue features three bars, a stage, and a 3,000-sq.-ft. dance floor with sound from a QSC KW Series Active Loudspeaker System.
- Local integrator Sean Wooldridge, a former sales engineer at Sweetwater Sound in Fort Wayne, IN and graduate of the Music Production and Engineering program at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA, installed the QSC system at the new Western-themed dance club.
- Even with the massive size of the dance floor, the power and coverage of the KW Series speakers allowed Wooldridge to achieve excellent coverage and intelligibility with a small number of speakers, he reported.
- “We installed six of the KW122 12-inch two-way speakers—three on either side of the dance floor. Then there are four of the KW181 18-inch subwoofers on the dance floor; we've got a little box for them there,” Wooldridge said. “It has a capacity of 1,200 people, and amazingly, the KW Series speakers covered the whole thing.”
- In addition to operating as a nightclub and bar, the Saddle Up also presents line-dancing lessons for patrons. “Every 20 minutes or so an instructor will go down onto the dance floor with a head-worn mic and teach. Next thing you know, there's a big line dance going on,” said Wooldridge. “So vocal intelligibility is critical in an application like this. And that's another cool thing about the KW Series Loudspeakers—the clarity is astonishing.”
- “QSC came in with the K8s, K10s, the K12s and KSubs when they were first coming out,” Wooldridge said. “They were playing program material as we walked into the meeting and it was filling the room with a decent level of sound. Someone said, ‘Can we hear it without the subs?’ Actually, they weren't even using the subs—just the K8s. So I knew these were some pretty serious speakers.”
- “As far as this installation, it makes it a lot easier if you've got a lot of sound coming out of smaller box. It just ends up being an easier installation," he continued. "The processing in the KW boxes makes them easy to manage and made my job a breeze. I knew that QSC was the way to go for Saddle Up.”
