Ibiza Sonica, Ibiza

Ibiza Sonica was founded in 2006 with a deliberately uncommercial premise, a station that broadcast what the island actually sounded like rather than what a playlist consultant thought it should. Two decades on it has become considerably more than a local radio station: a record label, a recording studio, a touring agency, a live broadcast operation covering events across the island, and a group of online channels. In 2012 it was named Best International Radio at the International Radio Festival. For a large number of listeners who have never set foot on Ibiza, Sonica is Ibiza, the thing they put on when they want the island in the room.

In a club, the system is shaping an experience. In a broadcast studio it is checking one, and everything that leaves the building is judged against what the monitors said. If they flatter the signal, the flattery goes out on air to tens of thousands of people. A monitor's only job is to be honest, including about the things nobody wants to hear.

Sonica's set-up makes that harder rather than easier. This is not a treated, symmetrical, purpose-built control room. It is a working studio, visible from the street, that doubles as a performance space. DJs play live on air, guests and artists pass through, and sessions are filmed as often as they are broadcast. There are windows on two sides. The room is small. And the same monitors that a presenter uses to check a level in the morning have to hold up when a DJ is playing a set through them at full commitment in the afternoon.

A hybrid studio like this needs a loudspeaker that behaves like a reference at low level and like a real PA cabinet when somebody pushes it. That combination is not common. It is, however, precisely what KV2's design priorities produce. The same dynamic range and signal integrity that let a club system stay clean at high SPL are what let a compact cabinet stay honest at monitoring level.

The monitoring position sits alongside the DJ set-up in the window, with cabinets either side of the booth, a working arrangement rather than a fixed one, chosen so that the studio can be reconfigured for a live session without an engineer being called.

Sonica has never been a station that polishes things. What goes out is what happened in the room, so the monitoring has to be blunt with the people making it. That is the only way the listener gets the real thing.

There is a neat symmetry to it. Across the island, KV2 systems are doing the loud, visible work: Amnesia's Main Room and Terrace, the beach clubs of Playa d'en Bossa, the sunset bars of Ses Variades. In a small studio behind a pane of glass, a pair of cabinets is doing the quiet work of deciding what all of that is supposed to sound like before it leaves the island.

KV2 Audio System:

• 2x EX10
• 1x EX1.2