City Nightclub Edinburgh

Castle Leisure Group (CLG) have undertaken their boldest venture yet by converting the former Scotsman newspaper printworks – situated behind Edinburgh's Waverley Station – into one of the most technologically advanced venues in the UK.

Set on a 30,000 sq ft footprint, they allocated a colossal £4.2 million to replace the industrialism of a bygone era with a glittering multi-level/multi-zone infrastructure. CLG's flagship venue merges City nightclub, restaurant and private lounge with Sportsters branded theme bar, via a state-of-the-art digital backbone in which lighting, sound, video, CCTV and even the cash tills are fully integrated under Creston touch control. As a result, the system can be remotely interrogated online by the installation company, PAI from their base in Wales.

PAI were just one of several key collaborators in this bold venture. But the company who had it hardest was probably architects and interior designers, Davidson Design, as MD Stuart Davidson recounted the difficulty (and cost) of acoustically insulating the steel work in the giant building from the five-star guests occupying the Scotsman Hotel overhead.

Aside from maintaining ongoing relations with the hotel, servicing the building was awkward because of the limited external openings and air circulation. He remembers that when he arrived on site originally it had been ‘'like walking into a concrete chamber – an open shell resembling an old industrial unit."

Working with Dimension Shop fitters, with whom they had partnered at CLG's previous venue in Perth, the Kirkcaldy-based concept team certainly made the best use of space by boring down two floors below the club (at sub-basement level) to accommodate their plant rooms and kitchens. ‘'The underground servicing arrangement left us with as much usable space as possible," said Stuart.

And use it they certainly have (in fact the net capacity they managed to achieve in Sportsters even surprised the designer himself). Imaginative walkways offer a continuous traffic flow……… past the glass-encased a la carte restaurant, exposed amp rooms and card-swipe entry VIP lounge where neon is set behind opalescent Perspex. Whatever your start point, there is a mazy circulatory feel about this place. The interior, with its red and blue neon piping and hardwood parquet flooring, is a triumph of dynamics and ergonomics – complex architecture which offers fascinating sightlines from every vantage point.

One of Davidson's masterstrokes is the large ceiling-mounted video console (similar to the kind of structure hung from the roof at an ice hockey stadium) – with a plasma display affixed to all four sides. Unbeknown to anyone (except those who had been onsite) this was the designer's ingenious solution for concealing the base of the hotel's lift shaft, boring down from above.

Based in Stirling, CLG was formed by brothers Paul and Stephen Smith in 1981, and last year turned over more than £15 million. While the former is for the front man, Steve is very much the man with the technical ideas – and was as proud to display ‘show' technology rooms, demonstrating the different layers of control, as a restaurant is to present a ‘theatre' kitchen. He had wanted to achieve total management control from any point, including all the environmental lighting with pre-programmed scenes. The digital backbone is a combination of Creston CNMX-PRO2 and BSS Soundweb, and via these devices PAI interfaced the CCTV, audio, DVD, video, satellite, audio sound processing and all the routing. The entire system can be remotely interrogated online, diagnostics run and gain settings reprogrammed thanks to the use of the four Soundwebs.

Paul Smith also points to the alcove seating in Sportsters as another technological breakthrough. The screen built into the table contains a ‘virtual menu', allowing remote ordering of drinks and food by a touch of a sensitive pad. Ten Minutes Later it will offer a reorder prompt. Games ports and internet access provide further diversions. To meet the requirements of a 16-zone, 7.1 sound environment in Sportsters Bar, PAI specified a distributed sound compromising of 63 Electrovoice EVID 6.2, 10 EVID 3.2 and a pair of EVID 12.1 subs – all in black and time-aligned using Soundweb.

The 7.1 system is processed through a Denon surround sound decoder, which also interfaces with the digital network, which handles the routing from eight static sources, four DJ points and two stage points through the 16 volume zones.

One of the CLG's early successes had been Fubar in Stirling, which is where Peter Dyer's Tarsin Entertainments first became involved with the company. He has provided the ASS Reflector system as the main dance floor sound in Edinburgh – just as he had done at the operators' last City venue in Perth, after the system won a competitive shoot-out set up by the Music Company.

Two large ground stacks, facing each other from opposite ends of the floor, have entrusted their gain settings to the BSS Soundweb and compromises a total of eight MX218 (twin 18in subs); 16 horn-loaded 1x15 MX-700 bass units, and eight MX-480 mid-tops (10in and 1.5in tweeters). The mid-tops are flown and inclined just above the top of each stack. Eight crown MA-3602's power the subs, while three Crown 2402's run the mids and the
ASS DJM DJ monitors – and a pair of MA-602's are assigned to the tweeters.

The two DJ consoles (in Sportsters and City) have also been highly specified………. Each station includes an Allen and Health Xone:62 Professional Club/DJ mixer, plus a pair of Technics SL1200's and Pioneer CDJ-800 CD players.

With its own separate entrance in this 1815-capacity extravaganza, City reveals a semi circular light rig, wrapped heavily around the heavily-damped DJ station, is dominated by Coemar moving heads.

A total of 16 truss-mounted Coemar ProSpot 250's four ProSport 150's and four of the powerful ProSpot 575's, with twin gobo wheels and 575 MSD lamp – form the bulk of a show which is run off the PC-based ShowCAD (supported by Avolite Azure).

Commented PAI's managing director, Paul Adams, "This is the first time we have worked with Coemar products and I am impressed by the excellent optical performance and colour saturation of the ProSpots."

As for the remainder of the lighting, the dynamic includes four Martin's MX4's and eight Pulsar Chroma Banks – all brought to life by two JEM ZR88's and a Martin Stage Hazer.

The entrance to the club (bringing customers in off the street at the first floor level) is imaginatively illuminated by Alien 05 recessed eyeball 8-colour change fixtures….. all of which adds to the suspense.

The sports element allows for distribution of two satellite feeds, multiple TV channels, various playback devices – as well as their own internal City TV television station, which broadcasts the company's messaging to over 100 screens located throughout their eight venues.

There are more than 50 monitors in Edinburgh alone, split into multiples of 17in LCD, 21in and 28in CRT and 42in plasmas – plus a number of motorised two-way video screens, front-projected using Sanyo PLC-XU46 projectors. Triggered from an Extron 16x16 matrix switcher, video sources can be rerouted from a number of points throughout the venue – including the till, where the operation's 32 CCTV cameras can also be monitered.

And so CLG's flagship venue has unquestionably set a blueprint for the future. And if the notion of a sports bar sounds too old – millennium (without being true retro) prefer to thik as Sportsters as a fully-integrated, next-generation internet café.

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City Nightclub Edinburgh