Cafe del Mar, Ibiza

The bar's influence is disproportionate to its size. The Cafe del Mar compilation series, launched in the 1990s, gave a name and a catalogue to a genre that until then had only had a mood. The sunset sessions played here became the template. For a generation of listeners, Balearic is less a place than a specific quality of evening light with music underneath it. Which makes Cafe del Mar an unusual audio brief, and a revealing one.

Everybody asks how loud a club system goes. Nobody asks how quiet it goes. Cafe del Mar is the venue that asks the second question. At the moment the sun touches the water, the music is barely above the sound of the sea, and it still has to be a full, complete piece of music. That is considerably harder to deliver than a loud room.

Most loudspeakers are designed with their upper limit in mind and simply survive the bottom of their range. Below a certain level the low end thins, the stereo image collapses and detail disappears into the noise floor, which is exactly the level at which Cafe del Mar spends most of its evening. KV2's design philosophy runs the other way. The emphasis on analogue signal integrity, high dynamic range and transducers matched to the electronics driving them is aimed at what a system does at the edges of its range rather than in the comfortable middle. Definition over distance is the phrase KV2 uses. At Cafe del Mar it might better be called definition over silence.

The building itself adds constraints. The interior is bright white and blue, with curved plaster ceilings, mirrored surfaces, glass and tile, which acoustically makes for a hard, lively room. It is also a design object in its own right, recently refurbished, with a gallery wall of commissioned artworks and a great deal of daylight. There is very little scope for large cabinets and none at all for cabinets that look like equipment.

The specification here was as much visual as acoustic. Compact cabinets in white, mounted high and angled down into the seating, so that the reflections off the hard surfaces work with the system rather than against it. If a guest notices the loudspeakers, something has gone wrong.

Loudspeakers are distributed through the interior bar and dining room and out across the terrace, with the DJ booth, a compact and beautifully finished position built into the artwork wall, served separately so that the resident hears the room accurately rather than hearing the terrace late.

The result is a system that most guests will never consciously register, and that is the correct outcome. Cafe del Mar has never been a venue where the sound system is the story. It is a venue where a very specific twenty minutes of the day is the story, and everything else exists to serve it. The guests come for the sunset, and they have been coming for more than four decades. What the venue needed was a system that disappears, one that lets a record breathe at low volume and then has something in reserve when the evening moves on.

The ritual is unchanged. The furniture points west, the room fills an hour before sunset, and somebody drops the right record at the right moment. Behind it now is a KV2 system doing the quiet, difficult work of making that moment sound as good as everyone remembers it.

KV2 Audio System:

• 2x ES1.0
• 4x ES2.5
• 10x ESD6
• 4x ESD10
• 4x ESD15
• 2x ESD1.18
• 2x EPAK2500R
• 1x SAC2
• 1x SDD3