In a city with as rich a reputation for contemporary style as Barcelona any new hotel must have something truly distinctive to offer. Four years ago, when it began renovating the Gran Hotel, La Florida, the Stein Hotels group had one obvious thing in its favour: location. Perched on a ridge atop Mount Tibidabo, the hotel is 300m above Barcelona, yet only 7km from the city centre. Not only are the views from the hotel extraordinary but the building itself is visible from almost everywhere in town.

In other respects though Stein faced a daunting task. The hotel had been closed since 1979, its fortunes having declined steadily since its ‘50s heyday when the likes of Ernest Hemingway, James Stewart and Rock Hudson signed the guestbook. The question arose: how to create a new symbol or urban style in a city already bursting to the seams with them?

However, it was in their desire to equip the hotel with the latest AV technology that La Florida’s interior designers hit one of their many problems, as Carlos Alberdi explains. “The specification called for a Panasonic 37in plasma display to be installed in all 74 guest rooms. The designers wanted to build most of these plasmas into the walls but when the room dimensions were set no allowance was made for the speakers on either side of the screens. So they had plasma images in the rooms but no sound to accompany them.”

Among Alberdi’s distributed lines the Amina range of NXT exciters and flat panels provided this solution, while elsewhere another of their major suppliers — Martin Audio — came up trumps.

Next door to the hotel’s conference space, but well soundproofed from it, is Club Luna — La Florida’s own night venue. Club Luna is only open to members and guests, offering live jazz four evenings a week and DJ nights on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

For sound Alberdi Pro installed a Martin Audio F10 loudspeaker in each of the room’s four corners, configuring them as two stereo pairs. These are backed up by a pair of Martin EM150 subs mounted under the stage. Power comes from two MC2 T200 amplifiers (one for the F10’s, the other for the subs), while signal processing is handled by XTA’s DP6i; this offers two inputs and six outputs, with the former having eight-band parametric EQ, bass delay and gain control, while the latter has crossover filters, five-band parametric, high and low shelving filters, limiter and delay.

“The idea behind both the lighting and sound was to make sure the system was adaptable,” says Alberdi. “For example the GLP SD1 (Show Designer) has many more channels than we are currently using so that if the venue decides it needs more lights we can accommodate them. With the XTA DP6i we initially programmed four settings, for jazz, dance, classical and techno — but these have already changed. Both the the SD1 and DP6i can be programmed by computer, so we can create new settings in our offices and download them here to see how they work.”
This is a system which almost cries out to be adapted as time goes by, and as for Alberdi Pro — as well as the brands installed, the prestige of being associated with such a high-profile project clearly counts for a great deal.

Adapted from an article by Dan Goldstein, that originally appeared in Installation Europe magazine, December 2003.