Tanit Beach, Ibiza

Tanit Beach takes both the name and the responsibility seriously. Opened on the sand at Playa d'en Bossa as the quieter sister venue to Nassau Beach Club, it is built around a gilded bust of the goddess that greets guests at the entrance to the restaurant. The rest of the design is warm rather than white: timber decking, mustard-yellow armchairs, rattan pendants, driftwood fish suspended from the ceiling, a printed bar wall. Where Nassau is glamorous, Tanit is closer to a very well-dressed beach house, and it runs the same demanding day, from morning coffee to a DJ at sunset.

The group already knew what it wanted here, having lived with a system next door. The instruction was straightforward: the same standard, a different character. Tanit is a softer room and the sound had to match it.

The technical brief on a beachfront site is unforgiving in ways that have nothing to do with SPL. Salt air corrodes. Sand gets everywhere. Direct sun degrades finishes. And the venue sits within a few hundred metres of residential buildings, which sets a hard ceiling on level regardless of how good the system is.

A beach venue is solved with distribution rather than with power. Many well-placed compact cabinets, each covering a small area, rather than a few large ones throwing across the whole site. The guest at the far table gets the same music as the guest at the front, and nothing spills past the property line. What makes the approach work is that each of those small boxes has to sound like a proper loudspeaker, which is where the choice of manufacturer stops being a detail.

The restaurant is the difficult zone. It is long, low, largely open to the beach on one side and hard-surfaced on the other, and at capacity it is full of people talking over each other. This is where KV2's design priorities do their least glamorous and most valuable work. The emphasis on analogue signal integrity and high dynamic range, usually discussed in the context of long-throw club and touring systems, translates on a lunchtime terrace into music that stays legible underneath conversation without being pushed up until it becomes tiring. Nobody writes reviews about that. Every venue manager knows the difference by the end of a season.

Loudspeakers are distributed through the restaurant and lounge, with cabinets over the DJ position and coverage extended out to the beach seating.

Tanit was never meant to be the loud one. It is where guests come when they want the sea, the sunset and a good record, in that order. The music still has to be excellent, because that is what people remember. The goddess whose name the venue carries was, according to the islanders, the goddess of dance. It seems only fair that the room built for her should sound like it.

KV2 Audio System:

• 2x ES1.0
• 4x ESD5
• 4x ESD12
• 2x ESD1.12
• 2x ESD1.15
• 2x ESD1.18
• 2x EPAK2500R
• 1x ESP4000
• 1x ESP1000
• 1x SAC2