1742, Ibiza

The number is the date. The building is an eighteenth-century palace, once a bishop's residence, converted with unusual restraint into a restaurant whose menu is built around the island's own produce. Dinner starts on the roof terrace, at the highest inhabited point of the old town, with the harbour, the port and the Mediterranean spread out below and the light going pink over Formentera.

Inside, the mood inverts completely. Deep aubergine walls, a custom carpet with the 1742 monogram woven into it in coral red, gilt mirrors, a suit of armour, low light. It is theatrical, intimate and extremely specific, and it presented an audio problem with no standard answer.

There are effectively two venues in one building. The roof is completely open, with no ceiling, no walls, wind off the sea and a view that cannot be obstructed by anything. The salons below are small, hard-surfaced heritage rooms where the fabric of the building can barely be touched. And the client's tolerance for visible equipment was, quite reasonably, close to zero.

The terrace had to be covered without a single mounting position interrupting the sightlines that are the reason people come. The interior rooms needed even, low-level coverage in spaces where drilling is restricted and where the acoustics, all plaster, stone, glass and reflective surface, will punish anything harsh in the upper mid.

The solution on the interior side was to make the loudspeakers part of the decoration rather than an exception to it. The cabinets were finished in the room's own palette, soft pink and off-white against the aubergine walls and the coral carpet, so that they read as objects within the design scheme rather than as equipment somebody forgot to hide. It is a detail that hospitality clients ask for constantly and rarely get. Colour-matching a cabinet is straightforward. Colour-matching it without changing what comes out of it is the part that takes care.

Acoustically, the argument for KV2 here is the same one that applies in a club, arrived at from the opposite direction. A room like this never runs loud. It runs at the level of a conversation across a table, all night, and at that level most systems simply stop being convincing. The bass goes first, then the sense of a performance happening in front of you. KV2's emphasis on dynamic range and analogue signal integrity is usually discussed in terms of what it does at high SPL over long distances. In a twenty-cover salon inside a palace, the same design shows up as music that is still whole when it is barely there.

The music at 1742 is not entertainment. It is part of the setting, like the light and the tableware. It has to be present and it must never intrude. Guests consistently describe the rooms as calm, and most of them have no idea that this is partly the sound system.

The restaurant opens daily in the evening, and the timing of the meal is deliberately arranged so that the first courses are served on the roof as the sun goes down. Somewhere between the amuse-bouche and the descent into the aubergine rooms, the sound follows the guests down, quietly, in a shade of pink chosen to match the carpet.

KV2 Audio System:

• 5x ESD Cube
• 4x ESD6
• 2x ESD10
• 1x ESD1.12
• 2x ESD1.15