Galvin's Restaurant is one of Georgetown's most popular watering holes, with a busting restaurant and a crowd of friendly regulars who gather to shoot the breeze and watch their team, the Southeastern Conference University of Kentucky Wildcats.
Like most busy establishments, there are those who come to watch the game, and others who want to hang out with friends. And as often happens, the banter of those enjoying each others' company can make it hard for others to hear the game.
"They had four small wall-mounted loudspeakers, and when things got busy the ambient noise made it hard for people to hear," said Curtis Cox of Nicholasville, KY-based Curtis Cox Music. "Some customers would ask for it to be turned up, and others would complain that it was too loud."
The room's acoustics precluded simply adding more or louder speakers. "The building is rather old," said Cox. "On one side the ceiling is plaster, and on the opposite side the ceiling is painted metal. We knew if we put speakers in the wall, we'd end up with sound bouncing all over the place. And running additional wiring through the walls would be a challenge due to the age of the building."
Cox's solution was to focus the sound downward using a distributed system of Community DP6 pendant loudspeakers. Eighteen of the pendant loudspeakers are suspended from the open-beam ceiling - three over the bar and the rest covering a pair of tables each.
"We ran each speaker to a custom-designed control box, with a 35W auto transformer on each speaker," Cox explained. "Now the restaurant manager can adjust each individual speaker's level to suit the customers' taste."
Crown CDi amplification powers the system, with an Alesis 8-channel line mixer providing inputs from various audio sources.
