Hi guys -

I have a friend who's about to open his first franchised restaurant. It's a hot wings place - a step above a fast food joint, but not a fancy restaurant. The kind of place where you'll sit down to eat, but won't linger. No liquor license for a while.

He wants to have music in the seating area, and possibly a TV or two up on the walls. His budget is TBD - but I know it will be small, so cost-effective is the driver here. The restaurant is about 2000 SF, with about half of that for seating. It's in a strip-mall setting, with large glass windows along the front of the shop, kitchen in the back. Basically a big square room.

I haven't inspected the place personally yet, but since this is my first commercial-type job, I wanted to get some preliminary advice on what to watch out for, some good systems (Niles???), and any other considerations I need to address before I go in and assess the location. I'm hoping someone on the forum can give me some preliminary heads-up advice. This is a good friend of mine and I want to treat him well, and to be sure I get & install quality equipment for him.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

Mark

I haven't done a restaurant before but I have been in a lot of Wings restaurants around Houston and one thing I have enjoyed is the Big screen TV's.. The best setup I've seen is one projection pointing to the back wall with two 55" 16x9 on each side of the room. Worked out well..

You will want to use a 70 volt system for this type of setup. easy to set up, and if he wants better quality speakers then the typical 70 v, there are adapters for 8 ohm to 70v from Audioplex.

You can get some good sounding 70v stuff from Tannoy....

Or now even Mackie makes a pretty decent sounding 70v speaker.

We did a wings place, 4 projectors, 20 plus TV's,six modulated sat recievers,four VCR's TOA 70v system with several B&W WP1 speakers (8 ohm with 70v adapters)
a signal sensing relay to one of the audio sat recievers so whenever someone fired up the jukebox it overrode the sat signal,(kinda touchy)
The only drawback to the whole system is that the customer didnt want to upgrade to better projectors,
and because they are on from 10-12 hours a day, they go thru a lot of bulbs,and the light coming in at times can wash out the picture . Other than that every thing works great.
so,Mark you have alot of different options you can go with, quality equip is the key.

Good luck

Thanks for the tips, guys - keep 'em coming! Looks like I've got a lot more research to do - never worked with a 70v system. I'll check out Tannoy and Audioplex - any other ideas?

We had this exact discussion last week, 70volt is the way to go for sure, I use Toa amps or pre-amp/amp setups. 70 volt is less complicated than sterio in reality. Just remember to run the speakers that need separate volume (volume control)"home run" but the rest you may go daisy-chain.I have use several diffrent speakers from Bose,JBL,TOA,EA,RCF and found they all do a pretty good job. I do recommend "flying" a sub or 2 in the place to deliver low end at lower volumes and drive the sats and subs separately. Try and tap your speakers at a higher wattages and remember not to "load up" your amp too much.

You don't have to run a home run for volume controls, just parallel off the run before you get to the VC.

www.mackie.com They make a good 70v ceiling speaker.

Mark
In case you didnt know,
100 watt 70v amp
10 speakers
you can tap the speakers at different watts
3,5,7,10 it varies
you wouldnt want to tap at 10 because it max's out you amp,(LIKE Twix said) you wouldnt want to tap at 3 because you would be wasting the other 70 watts of power.

CB1

Matt, It is true about running off before the volume but as a rule I home run incase we need to expand (speaker and power) in the future of course if it is a really long home run then I don't.
I will check out Mackie, I always use their mixing stuff.

Well, if you need to increase the power, change the tap value...if you need more speakers, parallel more on before or after the VC.

The only thing I 'worry' about is the gauge of cable. You don't want too small of wire, but normally 16 gauge would be plenty for most 70v systems.

Atlas Sound makes meat and potatoes 70 volt parts. More then you can imagine..
JBL Pro makes a wide range of 70 volt speakers and 8 ohm speakers. They offer a nifty solution for folks who need a dual zone preamp with paging, ducking, locked out control panel, an inexpensive source selector; I spec lots of them.
Crown amplifiers offer an unusual option to those in the home arena; their 70 volt amps can also run 8 ohms.
Buy an amp in their ch series, run one channel on 70 volt for mids and highs, and the second channel on 8 ohm for subs. Wanna rock your world? this will.

If you'd like info on this stuff, leave a post and I will respond via email to you directly.