Warner Cricket St Thomas Manor Hotel

Context

The Team

The Ballroom at Warner Cricket St Thomas Manor Hotel Gets Upgraded Sound with L-Acoustics

Warner Leisure Hotels, a chain of 14 rural and coastal hotels all around the UK, boasts luxury vacations in manors with bespoke packages that offer infinitely more than an elegant room for a few nights away. Drinks, food, cinemas, spas, pools, and complementary activities are all in very exclusive settings and all curated just for adults. Their hotels welcome bands, comics, star acts, and choreographed shows every night.

With increasingly more prominent productions, Warner’s focus on providing an outstanding guest experience included upgrading their sound system of the ballroom at its Cricket St (Saint) Thomas Manor Hotel in Somerset. A reputed haunt of Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton and the setting for much of the 1980s TV comedy To the Manor Born.

The Challenge

With top acts on the hotel’s roster, such as Billy Ocean, Aswad, 10CC, and Jane McDonald, their engineers and production teams expect to have a top-caliber PA system. Previously, the hotel would hire in and ground stack systems, which served the purpose, still, only as a temporary installation. The hotel team also faced issues covering the room comprehensively and aesthetic sightline issues with two big PA stacks. David Hall, Head of Technical at Cricket St Thomas, stated, “We also always struggled to deliver even coverage throughout the room – with the house or hired system – to ensure all guests have the same audio experience.”

The Solution

Hall appointed leading AVL specialists, Adlib, to carry out the refurbishment led by Installations Project Manager Tim Robinson.

Adlib set about fulfilling the client brief, selecting L‑Acoustics as the ideal choice for a rider-friendly PA system, which is aesthetically pleasing in a hotel environment and would solve coverage issues in the room. The resulting L-Acoustics system design comprised two hangs of six Kiva II line source speakers, six SB15m subwoofers in a flown arc sub array, one X12 to provide a delay in the furthest part of the room, and three 5XT compact speakers where the ceiling drops down to a much lower level.

Complementing the speaker system, Adlib installed two L‑Acoustics LA12X amplified controllers, and a QSC Q-Sys core processor for system routing and control, interfacing to the house or guest consoles and providing a user-friendly touchscreen front end for staff. In this way, the LA12X can be monitored and controlled daily while ensuring that none of their parameters could be accidentally changed.

System pictures

The Result

“The new system has been very well received by guests, and the atmosphere is tenfold what it used to be,” says David Hall. “Audience engagement now spans the whole room, so whether you’re sat in the front row or the back corner, you’ll hear the vocals clearly and feel that kick-drum hitting you in the chest. I knew there would be a difference, but I didn’t expect it to be such a noticeable change!”

Project photos