The Chaophrya Leeds restaurant site is unlucky at best, with regards to it’s audio system. The original installer never adjusted the EQ so it sounded particularly flat, in places there were some interesting equipment choices, indicative from the fact the restaurant to my knowledge didn’t occupy both floors of the building originally. They took on the other floor at a later point in time, the amp rack was moved downstairs and multicore used to try and tie it all back together.

The system went through a flood which blew up the original Cloud CXV-425 amplifier, directly at the bottom of the rack – likely due to the weight, these are a nightmare to rack especially on your own. This was replaced like for like and it worked ok again for a few months – until the PAT testers came in. They unplugged all the wiring and somehow their test equipment blew up the power supply in the replacement CXV-425, and did the same to one of the Bose Amplus 100 amplifiers.

I replaced all the Bose Amplus amplifiers and the failed Cloud CXV-425 amplifier with 2 CXV-425 amplifiers from my service stock, originally acquired from a job lot spares/repairs which I spent a weekend fixing/restoring for situations like this. For avoidance of doubt, I moved the amps higher up to leave them well clear of any future unexpected encounters with water…

All amplifiers are now 100V line direct drive. I also adjusted the EQ on each zone. The Bose FreeSpace 3 cubes and subwoofers now sound really really good, you wouldn’t even know it was 100V line.

In some of the ancillary areas, the original installer used Bose DS16 speakers (2″ full range driver only), but neglected to use the EQ cards (a requirement for this model). These don’t sound too great, and would benefit massively from the active EQ – maybe one day I will resolve this too on a future site visit.