Situated in the Pico Rivera section of Los Angeles, the El Rodeo Nightclub is a popular social gathering spot and restaurant that recently completed a substantial facility upgrade to better accommodate the ever-increasing weekend crowds. Live entertainment plays a huge part of the club’s attraction and, to provide the best possible sound for the various bands that perform there, the decision was made to improve the house sound reinforcement system. Now, the El Rodeo is the owner of a new loudspeaker setup drawn from the Aero Series 2 catalog of D.A.S. Audio.
Los Angeles-based International House of Music was contracted to handle the El Rodeo’s new sound system installation as well as the club’s upgraded lighting facilities. Oscar Naranjo, Jr., company manager and system designer for International House of Music’s commercial AV design/build division, discussed the challenges of the project and his decision to deploy D.A.S. Audio’s Aero 12A, a powered, two-way, mid-high, compact line array system.
“The nightclub section of the El Rodeo is very long and narrow—measuring approximately 250 feet by 80 feet,” Naranjo said. "With the stage positioned on the wide side of the room, the sound system needs to cover a very broad, but relatively shallow area. As a result, we were far more concerned with uniform horizontal coverage than we were long throw. After considering a variety of loudspeaker systems, we selected the Aero 12A because they have exactly what we needed for this space: broad horizontal dispersion and throw that was more than adequate for the size of the room. Being that the Aero 12A is self-powered, we didn’t need to concern ourselves with separate power amps and the rackspace to house those amps. As a result, the D.A.S. Audio system resulted in a cleaner looking setup, included amplification that is optimized for the enclosures, and made system cabling easier.”
The El Rodeo’s new D.A.S. Audio loudspeaker system consists of four hangs for a total of fourteen Aero 12A enclosures—seven modules per side. Two loudspeaker clusters are flown on each side of the stage. One cluster consists of four Aero 12A’s that face straight out into the room while the second cluster on each side is angled outward to provide coverage to the extremities of the space. These two outer clusters each consist of three Aero 12A’s. Loudspeaker management is handled by an XTA DP448 processor.
“We modeled the room using EASE Focus, an acoustic simulation application for the configuration and modeling of line array systems,” Naranjo said. “This software really helped us predict what the coverage throughout the space would be like. The combination of the Aero 12A’s self-powered design and its first rate, integrated hardware resulted in a very clean setup with uniform coverage throughout no matter where you happen to be. In the not too distant future, the plan is to augment the system with new D.A.S. Audio subwoofers—replacing the enclosures that are currently in use.”
