Nassau Beach Club, Ibiza

When it opened, the formula was new. Not a chiringuito with a stereo, and not a nightclub with sunbeds, but somewhere a guest could spend fourteen consecutive hours without the mood ever breaking. Sunbed in the morning. Long lunch. Sushi. A boutique. Balinese beds at the water's edge. And, running underneath all of it, a music policy taken as seriously as the kitchen. That formula has since been copied across the Mediterranean, and Nassau remains the flagship of a group that also runs Tanit Beach a few hundred metres along the same sand.

Nassau Beach Club website

The design is the other half of the proposition. The interior is white, cream and gold, with capiz-shell chandeliers, upholstered banquettes, mirrors, marble and a bar wall lit in deep blue. It is photographed constantly. It has no tolerance whatsoever for black boxes on brackets.

With a venue like Nassau the aesthetic constraint arrives before the acoustic one. The brief was to cover every zone properly and to make certain that nobody photographing their table ever has a loudspeaker in the shot.

The acoustic brief was not simple either. A beach club is really four venues sharing a name. The open sand has no boundaries at all and competes with wind and sea. The covered terrace is a half-open volume with a hard roof. The restaurant is a low-ceilinged interior room full of reflective surfaces and, at capacity, a great deal of conversation. All three have to be able to lift together in the evening, when a resident DJ takes the room from lunch service into something closer to a party, without ever crossing the level that a residential beachfront and a licence will tolerate.

On sand there is no help from the room. The answer is more compact cabinets placed closer to the guests and running at lower level, rather than fewer large ones working hard from a distance. Coverage stays even, the guest at the back is not being shouted at, and the neighbours never hear it. The approach only works if the small cabinets are genuinely good.

That is the argument for KV2 in hospitality, and it is the same argument the company makes for its club and touring systems approached from the other end. The design priorities, analogue signal integrity, high dynamic range and transducers built for the electronics driving them, are usually described in terms of definition over long distances at high level. In a beach restaurant at half past two in the afternoon, they show up as a system that still sounds like music underneath two hundred conversations and that does not become fatiguing over a fourteen-hour day. Staff notice this long before guests do.

Compact cabinets in white are distributed through the restaurant and bar, wall- and ceiling-mounted, finished to vanish against the white plaster, with separate zones for the terrace and the beach.

The guests at Nassau are there all day. The system has to be pleasant for eight hours and exciting for the last two, and it has to look like it is not there at all. The sand is the same as it was on the first season, the sunbeds are the same, and the music still runs from morning to well past sunset, now carried by a system that nobody in the photographs will ever notice.

KV2 Audio System:

• 2x ES1.0
• 6x ES1.5
• 8x ESD6
• 4x ESD12
• 2x ES1.8
• 2x EPAK2500R
• 1x SAC2