Awesome Events
Corporate Christmas Parties
Awesome Events is a leader in the events industry, hosting and organising the best in conferences, summer parties, christmas parties, awards and much more. Awesome Events, part of the Awesome Group, offers an all in one events solution providing everything from quirky venues to bespoke stages and set builds, as well as A/V solutions and full event management.
Run by Denis McCourt, the Awesome team first approached Direct Acoustics back in 2009 upon acquiring their first venue in Bloomsbury, in which they wanted to develop it into an events space using a big top circus tent and clearspan marquee over a six week Christmas period. Awesome was keen to run back-to-back shared and exclusive corporate Christmas parties and needed a proven sound solution to keep Camden council, and his Bloomsbury neighbours, happy.
Challenge
Preventing amplified music from not just bleeding between two venues a matter of metres apart but also meeting Camden Council’s inaudibility target at the nearest noise sensitive receptors, situated just 45m away.
Solution
Prove the concept to the Awesome Events team and Camden Council Environmental Health Department & then implement multiple Zone Array installations within two central London venues.
Result
Planning and licensing permission granted and a decade of successful Christmas corporate event runs.
The venue itself had historic amplified music noise complaints and due to the sheer size of the space (2000 capacity) plus the clever way that Awesome had split it up into four spaces, meant that multiple office Christmas parties could be hosted at any one time. Unsurprisingly multiple events playing separate DJ sets at the same time was always going to be a challenge to control.
To prove the effectiveness of our equipment, specifically our Zone Array directional speaker system, we had proposed that Direct Acoustics set up a demonstration of the Zone Array within the Bloomsbury Coram’s Fields, without any structure in place to show the Awesome team and Camden Council how the system performed in a worst case scenario.
Being in the centre of town, there was a consistently high L90 background ambient due to the nonstop hustle and bustle generated from passing traffic – which played into our favour during the demonstration. The venue is surrounded on all four sides by residential dwellings and student housing, the latter being just 45m from the venue source and so deemed by the council as the most noise sensitive location. A combination of the high background level and the significant directionality of the Zone Array proved amplified music to be inaudible at the student housing.
Once Camden Council signed the Zone Array off as a feasible mitigation solution, Awesome Events committed to installing a number of our systems into their Big Top Circus Tent, and also into the neighbouring Fountain Room, to allow the team to run two events simultaneously and successfully for the last decade.
The Awesome team is constantly on the hunt for additional London sites to grow their corporate Christmas market. Our Zone Array has now provided the ability to open up a potential pool of sites which before the Awesome team may not have considered as they feel safe in the knowledge that our technology will meet the required noise criteria to host their long event runs.
Ever wondered what makes a cracking Christmas corporate party? Head over to our latest blog post for a few pointers.