Space Eat & Dance, Ibiza

Pepe Roselló knows the strip better than almost anyone. He went on to found Space Ibiza and run it for three decades, turning a Playa d'en Bossa venue into one of the most decorated nightclubs on earth. When Space closed its doors in 2016, most people assumed the story was finished.

It was not. Roselló opened Space Eat & Dance on Ses Variades in 2022, a restaurant, cocktail terrace and sunset session venue built directly onto the rocks and looking straight out at the water. Lunch is Mediterranean and unhurried. Then the light starts to go, the DJ takes over, and the room changes character without ever quite becoming a nightclub. That transition, from conversation to celebration and back again several times a night, is the hardest thing a sound system on this island is ever asked to do.

The brief was awkward in the best way. The venue is open to the sea on three sides, so there is almost nothing to reflect sound back and every decibel that leaves the cabinet is gone. It sits inside a residential resort, so level discipline is not negotiable. It is a restaurant first, so the system has to sit under conversation at low volume and still sound like music rather than like a small speaker being polite. And it is a Pepe Roselló venue, so when the sunset set peaks it has to have weight.

Open-air sites punish loudspeakers. There is no room gain to help, no wall to lean on, and what the audience hears is exactly what the cabinet produces and nothing else. This is where KV2's approach shows itself. The definition holds at the back of the terrace, and it holds at low level, which in a venue like this matters considerably more than peak SPL.

That last point is the one KV2 systems tend to be chosen for. The company's hybrid approach, with analogue signal integrity maintained through as much of the chain as possible and transducers designed for the electronics driving them, is aimed squarely at what happens to a signal over distance and at the extremes of the volume range. In a club, that shows up as clarity at high level. On an open terrace during dinner service, it shows up as something rarer: music that is still complete at conversation volume, with the low end intact and the top end not yet reduced to a hiss.

Loudspeakers are distributed across the wooden terrace and the covered bar area, positioned to keep coverage even from the front rail to the back tables without a single obvious loud spot at the DJ position. It is a small thing that guests never notice and every venue manager cares about.

Sunset DJ sessions run through the week from early evening, with names drawn from the Space alumni network alongside live performances and local promoters. Those residents were, predictably, the toughest audience. The DJs who played Space know what a good system feels like and cannot be fooled. What they noticed first was that they could hear the record properly at a level that does not fight the sea, which is the whole point of the place.

Ses Variades has changed a great deal since 1980. What has not changed is the ritual: the crowd gathering on the rocks, the last twenty minutes of light, the record that everyone will remember. Space Eat & Dance has restored one of the strip's founding names to it, and given it a system honest enough to carry the moment.

KV2 Audio System:

• 8 x ESD10
• 4 x ESD Cube
• 7 x ESD1.10
• 4 x ESP4000
• 4 x SAC2