Mexico. Inside a beautiful building, full of details of Italian and Mexican cultures, the essence of Il Mercato Gentiloni is enclosed, a modern gastronomic center that offers multiple options to the public of Saltillo, Coahuila, a thriving industrial city located in northern Mexico.
For their owners, music is a fundamental part of the experience they provide to visitors, so they looked for a sound system that offered sharpness, coverage and flexible operation. The answer was found in AVINTECH, a local audiovisual solutions company, who designed and integrated an audio system distributed through a Dante network, with ControlSpace processing, to connect the more than 200 Bose Professional speakers that cover with good music the 14 spaces that make up Il Mercato Gentiloni.
Owned by an Italian-Mexican family with solid roots in Saltillo, Il Mercato was born from the creativity of Fabio Gentiloni, third of the four children of Emmanuel Gentiloni, a renowned businessman who opened La Terraza Romana, a classic restaurant in the center of the city, of which Fabio took the reins when his father died. The new gastronomic center is inspired by the family legacy, but with an innovative, risky and much broader vision.
The Il Mercato Gentiloni visitor finds six different restaurants, cafeteria, bakery, juice bar, private rooms, children's area and even a culinary school. All this within a building designed as a continuous space, organized from a central courtyard from which the different areas distributed on four levels and 8,500m2 of construction communicate. Its overall appearance combines industrial elements, brick walls, which is an iconic material of the region, and recycled and reused objects, obtained from the Gentiloni family ranch.
"The concept of Il Mercato Gentiloni is integral. The objective is for the visitor to live a total experience in which he enjoys a day around gastronomy, but with a touch of art, music and good atmosphere. An experience in which you always find something new that is naturally combined with gastronomy", explains Fabio Gentiloni, Director of Operations of Il Mercato Gentiloni.
According to Fabio Gentiloni, lighting and sound are two of the most important aspects in a restaurant. "It is the elements that give a cozy feeling, those that invite you to stay or tell you to get out of there as soon as possible. A good musical selection helps us to extend the time of stay of the diners and increase the consumption accordingly. So getting the music heard well, with the right power, is a success factor for restaurants," says the young entrepreneur.
In search of the ideal sound, Fabio and his brothers evaluated AVINTECH's experience and decided to rely on it to design and integrate the audio system. Previously, AVINTECH had integrated a successful ambient audio solution into the exterior corridors of Parque Centro, the shopping complex in which Il Mercato Gentiloni is located. The design of this project and the quality with which the 80 FreeSpace 360P speakers of Bose Professional are heard were good arguments for the company to be invited to present a proposal that included the sound system, in addition to networks and video surveillance.
To solve the challenge of Il Mercato Gentiloni, the AVINTECH team decided to create a Dante network to distribute the audio signal to each of the 14 sound zones. The signal travels through fiber optics from the main site to the IDF of each zone, in which FreeSpace amplifiers (IZA 2120HZ, ZA2120HZ and IZA190HZ) and PowerMatch (8500N and 8250N) configurable in network were installed, according to the specific needs of each space.
By using Dante, in combination with ControlSpace from the main site, you have great flexibility to distribute the audio signals to each area. From allowing each one to choose the content independently, to unifying the distribution, which is done when a concert is presented in the Central Courtyard or a band plays in a restaurant like La Cantina, so each area has a Dante Endpoint ControlSpace and a Dante network card.
Restaurants and other spaces have the freedom to choose music through the online platform BrandTrack, with six different channels available, so that the managers of each restaurant select the one that best suits the time of day and the profile of the diners present.
"From the beginning, Il Mercato's requests were very clear. Restaurants should have freedom to have different sound sources or share content from one space to another," says Héctor Martínez, director of AVINTECH. "In addition, we had to take care that the sound of one space will not be heard in another. This was quite a challenge, as there are many open areas and all spaces are connected by corridors or patios," Hector added.
An example of the sound insulation work was given in La Cantina, which is a restaurant where the volume of the music sounds louder than in the others. To solve this, acoustic panels and an epoxy cover were installed in the polystyrene sheds of the mezzanine that separates the Restaurant El Álamo from La Cantina. With this preventive measure, it was possible to reduce the effect of low frequency sounds and successfully isolate the environments of both spaces.
To solve the sound of most restaurants, cafeteria, bakery and culinary school were installed speakers of the FreeSpace DS 16SE, DS 40SE line and some FreeSpace 3 Series with amplifiers of the FreeSpace IZA family. While, in other spaces such as La Cantina, the Il Giardino restaurant and the Events Hall, AVINTECH integrated special solutions for each one.
In the il Giardino restaurant, with service available all day and which is transformed into a festive atmosphere space during the weekend nights, FreeSpace DS 100SE speakers, Panaray MB4 and a PowerMatch 8250N amplifier were added to increase the power and connectivity options by including the performance of a band or DJ.
To offer total freedom when making presentations, the Event Hall has a ControlSpace ESP processor in combination with a PowerMatch 8250N amplifier and FreeSpace DS 100SE and FreeSpace 3 Series speakers.
For its part, in La Cantina a versatile and powerful solution was integrated with a ControlSpace processor and three PowerMatch 8500N amplifiers to give the necessary power to the different models of RoomMatch Utility and LT Series speakers, in combination with other FreeSpace DS 16SE, DS 100SE and FreeSpace 3 Series models.
"When I visit one of the restaurants in Il Mercato it is common to meet friends or acquaintances and everyone agrees that the sound is very good, it creates the necessary atmosphere to enjoy the food and at the same time you can talk with others. These comments from satisfied users are very flattering," says Héctor Martínez, from AVINTECH.
The realization of Il Mercato Gentiloni would not have been possible without the conviction to bring together experts in different fields. From the architects and interior designers, to the audiovisual integrator, each participating company contributed its talent and experience, which generated confidence in the investors of the project. "Hector, from AVINTECH, put a lot of emphasis on using the Bose Professional team. It made us understand that, in a long-term project like ours, it was important to invest in the best available technology to achieve the desired result," adds Fabio Gentiloni.
"We want visitors to know our roots through Il Mercato, which is the result of our Italian-Mexican origin. Italians are very detail-oriented. Mexicans are very creative. And we are motivated by the search for quality in the details. Mixing Mexican and Italian cultures from the gastronomic point of view is easy, as both are very vast and rich in tradition. The challenge is to innovate and infect our 230 employees every day, but if you take risks, believe in what you do and give them the love they taught you, it is very easy to share the passion for a project as unique as this", concluded Fabio Gentiloni.
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