!Fest is a chain of creative restaurants, bars and clubs in the Ukraine. Its latest
project is !Festrepublic.Club, a new nightclub in the city of Lviv. The club’s owners
and management wanted a system of the same quality and impact as the iconic
Bowery Presents’ Terminal 5 and Webster Hall in New York City and looked to L-
Acoustics to ensure they could offer such an all-around, world class experience.
Converted from a former glass processing plant, the 1500 capacity nightclub has been
designed as a loft-style venue, with an industrial feel and a stage for live acts at one
end. The club’s owners want to ensure that the desires of visiting artists are always
met, but their main concern is to satisfy their guests.
“I want everyone who has ears not just to hear, but also to feel,’ says Andriy Khudo,
co-founder of !Fest along with Yurko Nazaruk and Dmytro Gerasimov. “Music is the
dialogue between artist and audience and emotions are the key to my guests` hearts.
I want them to experience delight every minute of every gig and to get what they
came here for.’
When the project was still in its initial stages, !Fest approached L-Acoustic’s certified
provider distributor for the Ukraine, ART-R to help them deliver Andriy’s vision.
“This was the first time an L-Acoustics sound system was going to be installed for day-
to-day use in a nightclub in the Ukraine,’ says ART-R director Sergey Rusnak. “We
have installed L-Acoustics systems in concert halls, premium karaoke clubs and
restaurants where live music is performed, but this was a new challenge. People come
to nightclubs to have fun all night long, and we knew we needed to create the right
conditions for them, delivering enough SPL to give that real club feeling, while making
sure it’s not fatiguing, so they can stay as long as they want to.’
“We used our 25 years of design and sound system installation experience for the
project,’ adds ART-R technical director Andrew Kotets. “But we also relied on L-
Acoustics Soundvision programme and measuring equipment to ensure we got the
right results.’
The system the team designed consists of eight Kara – two hangs of four positioned
left and right of the stage – eight SB18 subs – four each ground stacked either side of
the stage – and nine of the new ultra-compact modular line source Kiva II as delays.
“For this, we needed just four amplified controllers – two LA4X and two LA8,’ explains
ART-S Sound Producer Alexander Stulov. “We split the SB18 into two sets of four in a
cardioid configuration to avoid excess low frequency on the stage. Because the venue
is a long, rectangular shape and there are a lot of floor to ceiling columns running
down either side of the room, we used three delay arrays, consisting of three Kiva II
each, placed between the columns to give us the even coverage we needed.’