-- Alt-rock veterans Live achieved worldwide success in the mid-1990s, going on to sell over 20 million albums worldwide. And Live continues to be a band whose sharp minds have led to their current phase as highly diversified entrepreneurs.
The Live Memorabilia Lounge at the York Street facility, featuring loudspeakers systems from Bose Professional.
The home base of operations (and an investment itself) is the York Street facility in the band's hometown of York, PA - a renovated early 20th-century 53,000 square-foot, five-floor former printing plant in the city's downtown area. York Street houses world-class recording and rehearsal suites, in addition to offices for the team's various business ventures, including real-estate leasing company Think Loud Development, technology company United Fiber & Data, and of course the band itself, a 30-year institution. Tying the space together sonically are loudspeaker systems from Bose Professional.
This is a band that knows good sound, and Bose Professional systems are installed throughout the entire facility, from offices and meeting spaces to a professional-grade workout gym and the band's private lounge. They were looking to get a residential feel in what is a commercial-level space, explains Kevin Whitaker, Sr., Owner and Principal of Whitaker Brothers North, Inc., the AV systems integrator that installed the systems in the building. We did the home theater system in one of the other partners' home, and we used the Bose SoundTouch smartphone app, which lets you take total control of your listening experience. He loved its level of control and ease of use and said can we get that in the main building?' and we went all-Bose from then on. The project, which happened over five weeks at the end of last year, literally saw Bose Professional components go in from bottom to top, across five floors, including the roof. Whitaker drew expertise for product choices from Bose Professional field personnel, as he often does. I would say that in 95 percent of the projects I do, I have a Bose Professional solution available, from speakers to amplification to control, says Whitaker. We certainly did here.
The welcoming reception area leads into a hallway filled with sports and music trophies and other mementos of the owners' pasts in York, and background music and paging can be heard through Bose FreeSpace DS 40E and DS 100 flush-mount loudspeakers. Sound weaves into main-floor offices and other spaces using DS 16F surface-mounted speakers. The DS 100 speakers take this enveloping sound all the way up to the open roof-area lounges. They were looking for great sound for music, with tremendous clarity throughout the building, says Whitaker. The Bose distributed speakers are excellent for that.
On the second floor, United Fiber & Data has offices and a corporate training and meeting room. The left-right stereo system there is a double stack of Bose Panaray MA12EX modular line array loudspeakers, and an MB210 compact subwoofer, powered by a Bose PowerMatch PM4500 amplifier and managed using a ControlSpace ESP-1240 engineered sound processor, accessible via Dante wall plates. This is a large space that can hold up to 160 people but that can be divided into two classrooms by a movable wall, says Whitaker. The Bose MA12EX columnar speakers were the perfect solution for such a potentially large space because you get less than 3-dB deviation from front to back, left to right. Other solutions would have called for a distributed PA in here, but the MA12EX speakers mounted up front make it seem like an invisible PA is covering the entire room, so it looks as great as it sounds.
On the third floor, a full gym rocks to the sound of a pair of Bose FreeSpace 3 Series II Omni Pendant-Mount speakers buttressed by an MB210 subwoofer that fills the room with high-energy music. Users can hear their own playlists on Pandora or Spotify from an assortment of devices, like smartphones and tablets, using the Bose SoundTouch app. It sounds great - loud yet clear - and you get to choose your music, says Whitaker. It's the perfect gym. Also on the third floor is the Live Memorabilia Lounge, a comfortable area that celebrates the band's accomplishments. The space, which has been visited by the likes of U2's The Edge and members of Counting Crows (and is also used for corporate parties for the Fiber company and as a place for bands recording in the facility's studios to come in and relax between sessions), is outfitted with a performance-level three-box left/right Bose ShowMatch line-array PA system in the corners of one end of the 70-foot-long room, as well as a RoomMatch RMS218 sub. The room can take the full 115 dB the PowerMatch amp can pump into it and never stop offering crisp, clean sound, says Whitaker.
Everyone who comes here is blown away by the sound; you're just not expecting this in a corporate setting, says Whitaker. But this isn't your typical corporate building. Sound quality was incredibly important here, and Bose Professional delivered that, along with great control capability. Who wouldn't want to work here?
For more information, visit pro.bose.com.
# # #
About Bose Corporation
Bose Corporation was founded in 1964 by Dr. Amar G. Bose, then a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Today, the company is driven by its founding principles, investing in long-term research with one fundamental goal: to develop new technologies with real customer benefits. Bose innovations have spanned decades and industries, creating and transforming categories in audio and beyond. Bose products for the home, in the car, on the go and in public spaces have become iconic, changing the way people listen to music. Bose Corporation is privately held. The company&
