Phantom Billiards opened with 115 Joy tables spread over 7000 square metres. The owners wanted sound that stayed even from reception through the VIP rooms and main hall. Shanghai Haoyun chose 34 Nexo ePS12 point sources fed by four NXAMP4X2 amplifiers. Installers care because the room never goes quiet. Tables run late, background music must not fight conversation, and any drop in coverage shows up immediately. ePS12 placement plan - courtesy Nexo
Speaker Count and Coverage Mapping Thirty-four boxes is a lot for background duty. Each ePS12 carries two speakers per NXAMP channel. That loading leaves headroom but also means every amp channel is spoken for. Walk the floor at opening and you still find corners where level drops unless the boxes were aimed with a laser, not by eye. The club layout forces long horizontal runs. Cable paths had to cross service corridors without creating loops that pick up dimmer noise. One missed pull and you are re-pulling at 2 a.m. when the first league night starts. During the initial pull, the crew used a 40 m fish tape through two 90-degree bends in 25 mm conduit; it took two techs an hour to finish without kinking the NL4 jacket.
Amplifier Rack and Heat Load Four NXAMP4X2 units fit in a single 12U rack if you skip the blank panels. In a windowless back room that rack sits near 38 °C once the tables fill. Fans stay on low most nights, but any blocked intake turns into a thermal fault during the third set of matches. Power draw stays modest until someone pushes the DM3 master. Then the amps move from idle to 2-3 kW peaks. The house electrician ran a dedicated 32 A feed; sharing the circuit with refrigeration compressors proved unreliable during load-in.
Power Distribution and Redundancy The four amplifiers share a single 32 A circuit, yet the refrigeration plant on the same panel creates voltage sag when compressors cycle. The team added a small 3 kVA UPS on the control side only, enough to keep the DM3 and its network switch alive during a brief utility dip. No audio power is backed up; the design accepts that a full outage stops play anyway.
Front-End Mixer and Staff Hand-off A Yamaha DM3 sits at the reception desk. Scene recall is simple enough that the duty manager can switch from lobby music to tournament announcements without a laptop. The risk is stored scenes that no longer match relocated speakers after the first furniture shuffle. - Label every output on the stage box before the rack goes in - Store a printed patch list inside the amp door - Test scene recall with the actual playlist the club uses
Commissioning Under Real Conditions Final checks happened between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. after tables were levelled. Walking the floor with pink noise revealed two zones that needed a 2 dB pad once the room filled with bodies. That adjustment never appears on the modelling file. The crew also took SPL readings at seated ear height every five metres with a handheld meter; those logged numbers guided the final pad settings and became the reference for any future service call. Integrator takeaway: carry one spare ePS12 and a 10 m NL4 jumper. The bill of materials stays under the quoted line once you price the extra cable containment and the thermal probe on the rack intake.
