AV Case Study: Reine & La Rue

Text:/ Christopher Holder
Main Image:/ Samantha Shultz

LOOK BUT DON’T TOUCH

As anyone who’s had to build or renovate a heritage-listed space will know, the constraints can be punishing: effectively the fitout needs to be fully demountable, ie. every aspect is an ‘insertion’, able to be removed without so much as a scratch or screw-hole into the fabric of the original structure.

From an audio perspective, the stratospheric ceilings spell instant doom for anything like high-energy music to be piped into the space. The audio would simply build up and make speaking to other diners impossible. With the heritage overlay, there wouldn’t be anywhere to fit the speakers anyway.

But it turns out that Reine & La Rue opened its doors with one of the best music reproduction systems of any restaurant in the country. How it achieved this is quite an achievement.

GONE IN SIX SECONDS

The audio fix started with proper advice. Arup was engaged early on in the planning stage. Arup’s auralisation suite, Sound Lab, in its Melbourne office proved to be useful. After taking exhaustive starter’s pistol measurements in the empty shell space it was able to model the room for the owners. It confirmed what Rebecca and Al already knew – the empty neo-Gothic shell looked and sounded like a cathedral. The reverb time was an outlandish 5+ seconds up to around 500Hz. Everyone agreed something needed to be done.

“It was an interesting design challenge,” an understated Clare Xu, Arup Senior AV Consultant, observed.

The first challenge was to tame the acoustics of the space and then the second challenge was to design a loudspeaker system compliant with the heritage listing but still involving and high-fidelity.

Each acoustic panel is hand cut to precisely fit each architectural cutout, then given a colour gradation to appear as much like a natural section of sandstone.

SANDSTONE ACOUSTICS

Calming the rampant reverberation in the room was a priority. There are no magic bullets – as much acoustically absorbent material in the space as it can can reasonably accommodate. But without the ability to fix acoustic panels to the wall and ceiling, the installation options were limited and hobbled – under the chairs and tables, for example.

Arup came to the rescue, with some amazing lateral thinking. The big idea was to insert acoustic foam into the architectural cutout features of the walls.

“It’s a genius solution,” enthuses Rebecca. “My acoustic guys were incredible. It’s all on a batten system; it’s tension-held within the cutouts in the sandstone. And because this space is built by hand, each cutout is different, hand-cut and measured on site. And then there’s a colour gradation on the surface of each of the panels, because if it was all the same colour, it would look fake. It was a 12-month process with the best people in the business.”

Elsewhere, the joinery uses perforated timber to conceal more acoustic material in areas such as the bar front and waiters’ stations.

“Opening a 135-seat restaurant in a cathedral room has its challenges acoustically, but we don’t get complaints here – everyone can hear their dining partner, and for me, that’s hugely important,” continues Rebecca.

LYZARD: FLAT RESPONSE

With the acoustics of the cathedral space brought to heel, the next audio challenge was what loudspeaker system to install and where to install it. Placing loudspeakers above head height around the perimeter of the room (as is customary) wasn’t possible. Even if mounting those speakers was permitted, reaching the diners in the middle of the space without unnecessarily exciting the room would have been unworkable. Dropping pendant speakers from the ceiling wouldn’t have made it past the heritage police either.

“We worked closely with the architects and explored how we might use the joinery insertion in the centre of the room to accommodate loudspeakers,” explain’s Arup’s Clare Xu.

The design feature (the booth seating and joinery that sits in two halves in the middle of the space on top of the glass tile floor) served as a mothership for speakers, but not just any speakers, a specialised architectural miniature loudspeaker by Italian manufacturer, K-Array. The product is called Lyzard and it’s about the size of two matchboxes stacked vertically. The Lyzards were positioned so as to not be directly pointing at diners’ heads, providing indirect but proximal sound. Companion subwoofers are installed and concealed into the joinery providing a full-range sound for background music purposes.

“We’d not had experience with Lyzard prior to this project but they’ve been very impressive,” reports Clare Xu. “They’re absolutely tiny and you can match to any RAL colour or metallics, like a bronze or gold finish. They’re surprisingly powerful and sound great.”

The K-Array Lyzards can be found elsewhere in the restaurant providing quite an even coverage of the whole room. Insight Systems took care of the system integration and installation.  The effect is disarming – the music immerses patrons without a sense of where the source is located.

“We often have diners commenting on the music,” notes Rebecca. “They can’t figure out where the music is coming from and it’s fun to reveal it to them. In fact, the audio solution is one of the aspects of the fitout I’m most proud of. My husband and I have been to high-end restaurants all round the world and I’ve not found one that has a better solution than ours – it sounds superb and it’s ingenuous. We couldn’t be happier.”

Arup’s glacé cherry on top of the audio system is an auto-sensing system that lowers and raises the music level according to the ambient sound in the room – freeing up staff from the sometimes tricky task of getting the volume of the music just right.

Another view of one of the K-Array Lyzards. Where possible, more acoustically absorbent material is concealed behind perforated timber.

OVER THE HORIZON

Some hospitality ventures are urgent, vital and capture the zeitgeist energy of the moment. Others, like Reine & La Rue have a slow gestation, slow build and long-term aspirations. Rebecca concurs: “This is a long-term project – it’s a long-term lease and a long-term proposition for the market.

“It’s a sustainable restaurant at all levels, from the staff and how they’re treated and how many hours they’re working; the produce and the farmers that we work with – which is the best in the country; all the way through to making sure the materials we’ve used, the joiners we work with, the furniture designers, they’re all paid what they’re worth. It’s an eco system we’re trying to build. That’s the payoff for us and rewarding for the diners.”

Arup: arup.com
Insight Systems: insightsystems.com.au
Australis Music Group (K-Array): australismusic.com.au

EQUIPMENT HIGHLIGHTS

K-Array Lyzard & Rumble Loudspeakers
Q-SYS Core 8 Flex DSP
Audio-Technica ES945O Noise Sensing Mic
Yamaha XMV8140-D 8-channel amp
Shure SLX-D Wireless Mic System
Blustream Dante Audio Encoder
Williams Sound IR Hearing Augmentation