L-Acoustics A Series Goes Underground on Nashville Rooftop

When Nashville Underground first opened its doors on Lower Broadway two years ago, the four-level music venue, restaurant, bar, and event space co-owned by singer-songwriter brothers Joey and Gavin DeGraw added a new and exciting justification for Nashville’s Music City moniker. Boasting the city’s highest and largest rooftop deck—a double-level one, at that—the impressive space is also home to two kitchens, four bars, and three stages plus a DJ booth that host live music seven days a week. To bring these performances to life, Nashville Underground invested in a new L-Acoustics A Series system provided by Camarillo, California-based Rat Sound Systems.

“When Nashville Underground Operating Partner Joshua Pemberton called me, he was looking to bring more high-caliber artists into the venue. He needed a powerful, high-fidelity sound system, but also needed it to be easy to set up, since it would be constantly moved between their multiple performance areas,” says Rat Sound’s Dave Rat. “The new L-Acoustics A Series had just been introduced and we knew it would give the venue extremely high-quality sound and a brand name that is very attractive to top DJ and artist riders—but, also be ultra portable and quick to deploy to wherever they needed it that day.”
 

Rat Sound supplied the venue with pairs of medium-throw A15 Wide enclosures, KS21 subs and LA4X amplification from its own rental inventory, which Pemberton demoed onsite, then immediately called Rat back to order a set. This established Nashville Underground as the first venue on the Broadway strip—aka the “Honky Tonk Highway”—to own an L-Acoustics system. Three days later, the system was delivered, just in time to reinforce a packed DJ event on the rooftop deck.
 

"We’re excited to have the first L-Acoustics rig here on Broadway, the heart of Music City,” Pemberton enthuses. “They’re perfect for our use, sound incredible, and really separate us from the competition. It's exactly what national touring acts and their agents want to see and, of course, what they want to hear."
 

Dave Rat agrees, “The A15 is exciting in that its passive configuration allows extremely efficient usage of amp channels. It’s a small, portable system, but the sound is powerful and articulate. We’ve sold quite a few A Series systems to rental and production houses here on the West Coast, but with most of the other venues in Nashville still using older sound systems, Nashville Underground has set itself apart with this modern, scalable system.”
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Nashville Underground will continue to expand its facilities by taking over two more floors of the former transfer warehouse and converting them into an eight-lane bowling alley, bringing the venue to occupy the entire 55,000 square feet of its historic building.

About Nashville Underground
Located at 105 Broadway (between 1st Avenue and 2nd Avenue), Nashville Underground boasts the highest, largest and only double-deck rooftop with a 360-degree view on Broadway, while delivering an experience where you can drink, taste, and hear Nashville.

The live music venue, restaurant, bar, event space, and rooftop dance club, owned by brothers Joey and Gavin DeGraw, showcases Nashville’s world-famous music, cuisine, and spirits. In the heart of downtown on historic Broadway, Nashville Underground, which opened in January 2018, has four large levels. The menu highlights Nashville’s unique culinary palette, using locally sourced ingredients to create southern cuisine such as Nashville Hot Chicken and a myriad of innovative Nashville Hot items. All four bars include an expansive selection of locally crafted wine and spirits, as well as the coldest draft beer in Nashville, at 29 degrees. Shortly, Nashville Underground will begin construction on the third and fourth floors creating Broadway’s first multi-level bowling alley and bringing Nashville Underground to occupy all six floors of the historic building.
 

With three stages, a mechanical bull, a fireplace, a green grass roof, over 40 TVs, a DJ booth, and LED video rooftop dance floor, multi-genre music is featured seven days a week.
 

About L-Acoustics
Founded in 1984 near Paris, France, L-Acoustics is the market leader in professional sound reinforcement technologies. With over 400 team members worldwide and offices in Paris, London, Los Angeles, and New York, L-Acoustics is present in over 80 countries via our network of Certified Providers. Focused on solutions that elevate the audience experience, more than 20% of L-Acoustics’ talent is devoted to R&D in the areas of acoustics, applications, mechanics, electronics, signal processing, and software development.
 

Recognized for pioneering the line source array, L-Acoustics continues to shape the future of the professional audio industry with L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound technology, a multidimensional, object-based approach to designing, mixing, and processing sound that results in extremely natural and intelligible audio, and a more vibrant and authentic connection between artists and their fans.

L-Acoustics technologies can be heard in places like the Hollywood Bowl, the NFL Cardinals State Farm Stadium, or the Philharmonie de Paris, as well as the world’s top-grossing festivals, and on tour with world-class artists such as Adele, Pearl Jam, Lorde, and Depeche Mode.