Mackie Helps Make Venice’s Air Conditioned Supper Club Cool on the Inside
Rule Number One in the Book of Cool says the hipper you are, the less you have to try and prove it. The Air Conditioned Supper Club proves the point. The nondescript storefront and innocuous signage marking the newest night spot in Los Angeles’ Venice district would be easy to miss, were it not for the lines stretching around the block most evenings.
The area itself has not been known for its nightlife, and the venue’s unremarkable red-beige exterior belies the retro-modern décor inside, where a chic but casual crowd samples exotic cocktails and shimmies shoulder-to-shoulder on the small dance floor to the eclectic grooves of live DJs and local acts.
What really sets the Air Conditioned Supper Club apart is the warm and welcoming neighborhood feel of the place. The intimate, 3700-square-foot venue holds somewhere around 300 people, but the owners were adamant that the club, like their Air Conditioned Lounges in San Diego and Santa Monica, would sound as good as it looked. San Diego-based Fluid Sound was brought in to design a high-performance system based around Mackie and EAW components.
The main PA is comprised of a pair of EAW MK2364 two-way full range loudspeakers. In the rear, another pair of MK2364 cabinets cover the first fill zone, with two MK8196 two-way speakers comprising a second zone. Under the stage, four EAW SBX220 subwoofers handle the low end. “We used a bit of horizontal steering on the subs to tune the sweet spot inward toward the dance floor,” says Fluid Sound’s Dennis Pappenfus.
A FireWire-equipped, 16-channel Mackie Onyx 1640 handles main mix duties, while the DJs use a Mackie D2 DJ mixer, also with FireWire connectivity. “We can take a dry multitrack feed from the board, allowing us to do live recordings,” Pappenfus explains. “We wanted to make sure that the room would sound good enough for even A-List artists to perform and record here, since they frequently drop in.”
A self-powered Mackie SRM450 two-way self-powered loudspeaker provides monitoring for the DJ area, while a pair of S408 two-way precision passive monitors provide rear fill, pointing back at the stage to bring added presence to the dance floor area. Four more S408 cabinets provide monitors on the stage. The VIP room is served by a pair of S408 speakers and a single S410s quad subwoofer, powered by Mackie M3000 amplifiers.
As Pappenfus explains, the owners have been quite pleased with the Mackie/EAW-based systems installed in the two existing Air Conditioned venues, and were keen to stick with a winning formula for the Venice club as well. “If I’d been asked to try and configure a system around one brand or family of brands, I probably wouldn’t have been very comfortable with the request. But I’ve got extreme confidence in both Mackie and EAW brands, and their product lines are diverse enough to easily fit the bill.”
