The Aquarium (Austin) features a sound system designed and built by Musicmakers Austin and uses ModularDesign™ Series loudspeakers from QSC.
“The Aquarium is a bar with high-output foreground music only—there’s no live entertainment,” Chris Beall, a Musicmakers Austin sound designer, relates. “There’s always a potent mix of acoustical energy rocking the place, but dancing isn’t really part of the action. It’s a club where you come to hang out, meet people and socialize.”
The club’s proprietors, brothers Jeff and Darren Van Delden, have been opening between two and three new clubs annually, and Beall continues contributing to projects as their sound designer, taking what he calls an “over-engineered” approach in every case. “The Aquarium job was a retrofit of one of their existing clubs,” Beall relates. “While what we installed may seem like foreground music overkill to many, that’s what this crowd wants and expects. By selecting QSC’s ModularDesign loudspeaker components, we gained cash and labor savings, but still obtained the desired results.”
With power supplied by a masterful duo comprising a single QSC RMX 4050HD amplifier and a single RMX 1450 amplifier, the Aquarium system uses three ModularDesign MD-F152/94r 15-inch loudspeakers with rotatable horn sections flown above the room’s main bar. Supplementing these three devices is a pair of MD-S218 dual 18-inch subwoofers—which were recently added to the ModularDesign line—deployed to the bar’s left and right.
“If there was anything that surprised us on this job, it was the fact that all these cabinets sounded fabulous right out of the box,” Beall adds. “Especially the subs. Normally, you would have to tune things with an equalizer to get them to sound this good, but with these products, you get that kind of performance right after you strip away the cardboard they were shipped in. For high output in a short-throw application like this, we couldn’t have done better, and it’s not like these boxes cost more than others.”
For more information, please visit www.qscaudio.com and www.aquariumbar.com.
