Morgan Wallen’s This Bar chooses RCF for spectacular sound

The TC Restaurant Group, which manages several artist-themed establishments in Nashville, reached out directly to RCF about outfitting This Bar’s audio system, which led in turn to Nashville-based integrator JAG Warner Productions being tasked with the design. “We do things on this scale pretty regularly,” says JAG Warner president Jake Warner. “This is our area of expertise.” The biggest challenge, he shares, was optimizing sonic quality within a highly reflective environment without changing the look and feel of the building. JAG Warner had just over two months to gather the gear and complete the install.

Warner was confident that the speakers would arrive on time and in perfect condition, based on his long history with RCF products. To meet the tight deadline, RCF USA coordinated shipments from its U.S. headquarters in New Jersey and the Italian factory in Reggio Emilia, Italy, which arrived simultaneously, on time and in perfect shape. “Logistics at its finest,” declares Warner. “Sourcing these components was a seamless process.” 

The showcase system on the first floor of This Bar features two hangs of six RCF HDL 28-A active line array modules. Three SUB 9006-AS dual 18-inch active subwoofers are mounted under the stage in a broadside array. Active TT 515-A two-way loudspeakers from RCF’s flagship TT+ Audio line provide front and under mezzanine fill.

This Bar’s management “want the music to hit you just as hard at the back of the rooms as when you walk in,” says Warner. “We were given an error tolerance for level from front to back of plus or minus 1 dB over near 70 feet, and we hit it.” He adds that the RCF system delivers a full spectrum and “very musical solution.” Veteran live sound specialist Michael Lawrence “purposefully voiced” the system for transparency on behalf of RCF. “You’re not going to get a better alignment than what Michael has done in that building,” Warner enthuses. “It is within a hundredth of a millisecond to perfect. If you put a good mix into it, you’re going to get a good mix out of it.” Because of its proximity to the iconic Ryman Auditorium, he adds, “the system, at least in the low end, needed to be very controlled. You can’t even tell that that system is on outside of the building.”

Equal loudness coverage of high-end background music throughout was the concept for the second-floor restaurant at This Bar, achieved with RCF WMR 60-T two-way wall mount speakers. As with all This Bar’s upper floors, if the focus shifts to live performance from a room’s stage, the systems can switch through Q-SYS to a fully delayed stage focus with primary sound in the restaurant from RCF COMPACT M 12 cabinets and S 12 subwoofers.

The third-floor nightclub at This Bar has a much larger mezzanine, hence the smaller array. A four-per-side hang of HDL 28-As covers a space 22-foot-deep in what Warner calls “a super high impact system.” Additionally, he says, “there are 13 515-A units between under balcony and above balcony fills around that room to keep the same error tolerance of sound level as we had on the first floor.” TT 25-A II cabinets round out the system as stage fills, with massive low-end augmentation from four TT+ Audio GTS 29 dual 19-inch subwoofers. “That’s the fun part,” adds Warner. “They have live bands during the day, then at night DJs go onstage and they turn the stage into a dance platform.”

“The subs cover the entire room,” he elaborates. “Two on the ground cover the bulk of the low end for the floor level patrons and stage. The two in the air round it out for the entire room. You’re going to get the same impact of bass anywhere in the room.” The subs are capably powered by an XPS 16KD four-channel, 16,000 W DSP amplifier. “That much power,” says Warner, “coming out of a two rack-unit device with everything else that you can do with it – Dante® native, DSP, the GPIO ports – it’s a fantastic amplifier.” 

Finally, on the rooftop, TT 25-A II active two-way cabinets and SUB 9006-AS subwoofers fill a lounge with sound, with four P 6215 two-way weatherproof coaxial speakers on the adjoining patio. A 100-plus endpoint Dante network interconnects This Bar, with Q-SYS control integrated with RCF’s RDNET software via a custom written plugin. 

“We’ve gotten so many compliments and comments, from countless numbers of our clients, that the RCF systems we’ve installed are just so clean and clear, even at high SPLs,” Warner concludes. Nothing less was expected at This Bar, and expectations were realized. “Every single engineer who has walked into This Bar has said that this system sounds amazing.”