When Murray Bros. Caddyshack opened the third restaurant in its growing chain of golf-themed eateries in central Florida, the company tapped First Coast Entertainment (FCE) for the entertainment systems installation. At this latest location, in Orlando, FCE installed a system that leaned heavily on JBL Control Contractor and Business Music series products to address the restaurant's distributed sound requirements.
As the name hints, Murray Bros. Caddyshack (corporate slogan: "Eat, Drink & Be Murray") is a business venture backed by comedian/ actor Bill Murray and his five brothers-actors Brian, Joel and John and businessmen Andy and Ed. The Caddyshack restaurant chain has a theme that has been described as "country club gone awry."
The challenge was to supply and install a system at the Orlando location that could support both intelligible upfront and intelligible background sound from the same system in a multi-zone setup.
Those requirements, according to FCE president Gene Salano, included the ability to select paging and audio sources for each of six zones. "They needed foreground paging and background sound," he said, "with paging in the common areas and no paging in the dining areas."
The best candidate for the job was the JBL Soundzone Business Music Controller offered by FCE. The company installed three units to handle multi-zone audio distribution in the building, which incorporates dining areas, a pool room, retail store and restrooms.
"They built chambers for us to put subwoofers between the seats, so there are eight JBL subwoofers throughout the whole place. It really rocks if you turn it up!" said Salano. Atlas Sound 70-volt ceiling speakers support audio in the kitchen areas.
The JBL Soundzone's exclusive AutoWarmth function automatically adjusts tonal balance and maintains full music fidelity even for low-level background audio. "It's a pretty cool feature," Salano noted. "It sounds really warm in the retail store; there's a subwoofer in there as well."
The Soundzone controllers are installed in a 44-space Raxxess rack, along with Crown CTS 600, CTS 3000 and 4-channel CTS 4200 (driving the subs) power amplifiers, plus a variety of AV sources in the restaurant's mechanical closet/telco room. Sources for the bar's four 56-inch HD LCD screens, including nine (mainly sports) DirecTV satellite channels and even PowerPoint presentations, are selected via a multichannel Pico Macom modulation system.
