After more than 12 years of growth, success, and rave reviews in West Kendall, Florida, Chef Adrianne Calvo, the owner and manager of Chef Adrianne’s Vineyard Restaurant & Wine Bar, decided it was time to move to a larger, more customized location.
Chef Adrianne took over and completely renovated an existing 8,000-square-foot restaurant space. The new space features a large indoor dining area, two private dining rooms, and a social-distance-friendly terrace outfitted with a large retractable projection screen and other AV tools throughout to accommodate special events. The new space has been designed with a warm, modern, Napa Valley wine country décor featuring tall ceilings and wide-open spaces. It can accommodate 270 patrons — a sizable jump from the old location’s capacity of 60.
With audio support playing an essential part of the restaurant experience, Calvo turned to audio expert Ivan Sotomayor, President, and Owner of ISF Enterprises, a south Florida based audio and AV integration firm that focuses on restaurant, club, retail, and multi-use facilities.
“This installation was fun but also a bit challenging,” said Sotomayor. “There are multiple indoor audio zones we need to control, and outdoors, the facility is next to a waterway, so we needed an appropriate volume level and control for optimum sound quality and intelligibility for music as well as presentations — and they even needed surround-sound capabilities outdoors.”
Sotomayor explained that the team used a program called Ease to help map out the number, size, and speakers’ locations to best cover the facility.
“A restaurant of this size can use a lot of audio zones, requiring many separate audio feeds,” added Sotomayor. “They even have unique audio zones in the entrance area where patrons wait for seating, and we added sound to the kitchen and chef area back of house.”
Ultimately, the sound system required ten audio zones to cover the restaurant appropriately. The team selected three Connect 354 IoT-enabled amplifiers from LEA Professional to power the system. Perfectly suited for small to medium scale installations, these two, four, and eight-channel amps feature direct HiZ (70V or 100V) or LoZ selectable by channel.
With three ways to connect, integrators can engage the built-in Wi-Fi access point, connect to the venue’s Wi-Fi, or use the FAST Ethernet to connect to any local area network via Cat5 or Cat6 cable. The Network Connect Series is the first professional amplifier family to feature Cloud connectivity for remote control, monitoring, notifications, and more from any personal devices.
“The three LEA amps give us 12 channels of power, so we have a little growing room. We’re using a 70-volt system over the entire place with Sonance speakers throughout, and it’s worked out nicely,” said Sotomayor. “We were recommended the LEA amps, I had not worked with them before, but now that we’ve had a chance to hear them and see how they operate, we use the DSP to really make the sound perfect in each of the individual zones. They are great amps that I will use for more installations for sure.”
Like any new system, the team is learning and adjusting, and a key capability of the LEA Professional amplifiers is the cloud connectivity. Sotomayor and his team are looking forward to fully working with the amplifiers’ connectivity to be able to troubleshoot or tweak system parameters remotely, any time needed.
“As we all know, nothing happens during regular business hours, so the remote connectivity is a huge benefit for us,” said Sotomayor. “If we need to mute channels, adjust settings, or even pro-actively look at the system to make sure all is good. And if there is an issue, we can make a fix and never need to roll a truck, and the customer is back on-line in a matter of a couple of minutes, not hours.”
Sotomayor added that the entire team has been great to work with and that Chef Adrianne — as well as her staff and customers — have been very happy with the results.
“This project has been all about quality,” said Sotomayor. “It’s a beautiful restaurant, excellent food and service, and the high-quality, high-definition sound system with all its many custom zones, really sets a great dining and meeting experience. I look forward to working with LEA amplifiers on future projects.”
