DesignLive Technologies keeps the peace at Chill Skybar

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VIETNAM: Overlooking Ho Chi Minh City from the 26th floor of the AB Tower, Chill Skybar is an upscale venue offering food, cocktails and ‘one of the best rooftop views in the city’. An evening at Chill Skybar is divided into two parts – before 9pm, the venue plays a mix of deep house and chill out music to allow guests to talk and sightsee. After 9pm, a blend of EDM, hip-hop and house music gets the party started. But a persistent issue with noise spillage has meant that its audio specification was deemed inadequate, leading the management to enlist local A/V firm DesignLive Technologies to undertake an upgrade.

‘The venue was very highly regarded, but there was a problem with the sound quality and noise bleed had resulted in complaints from neighbouring properties,’ explained DesignLive Technologies owner, Phu Tran Pham. ‘Working with Dave Coxon from DJW Projects in Australia, we set about reworking the entire system, basing our design around smaller speakers on vibration mounts and having them fire inwards instead of outwards. Everything sits on a Dante network, and the key to making all this work is a pair of Symetrix SymNet Radius 12×8 open architecture Dante-scalable DSPs.’

Following installation, Mr Phu noted that the DSPs ‘really helped us to optimise coverage and get the best possible sound quality from the outside space, which has quite an unusual shape.’

Joining the DSP units and four SymNet xOut 12 output expanders are amplifiers from Powersoft and loudspeakers from EAW and Australian Monitor. Background music, live DJ sets and more are relayed by the system throughout the venue, which can reportedly be used in separate indoor/outdoor configurations or as one large combined space.

‘We love the functionality and reliability of Dante networking, and we are finding that the combination of Dante and Symetrix SymNet processors is a really strong one for us,’ concluded Mr Phu. ‘That certainly applies in the case of the Chill Skybar project, where the owners have offered exceptionally good feedback about the new set up since the upgrade was completed. The end-result, I believe, is one of the best-sounding systems in the whole of Vietnam.’