Four-zone hospitality audio for the Fremantle Bar and Restaurant, Crowne Plaza Docklands
The venue
Crowne Plaza Docklands is a 210-bedroom, four-star IHG hotel situated close to the O2 Arena and ExCel Exhibition Centre in East London.
The hotel’s Fremantle Bar and Restaurant is a new Australasian-inspired all-day concept occupying the ground floor — serving hotel guests, conference delegates and local visitors across a main bar, restaurant, private dining room and outdoor terrace.
The project was part of a significant upgrade to the hotel’s existing audio infrastructure, undertaken as part of the Fremantle concept rollout.
The installation was entrusted to Middlesex Sound, a Uxbridge-based AV specialist with extensive hospitality installation experience.
System at a glance
Loudspeakers — supplementary
Acoustically constrained areas — transformer and compact variants
Audio sources
Background music player, BT Sports TV package
Zone 4 HDMI pass-through for sports audio integration
Installer
Middlesex Sound
Director: Darrel Olivier · Uxbridge, UK
The challenge
The brief from Crowne Plaza was precise on three fronts — and the three requirements pulled in slightly different directions.
Sound quality had to meet the expectations of a four-star hotel brand. The Fremantle concept is a premium all-day restaurant — guests arrive with quality expectations across every touchpoint.
Uneven or thin audio in a dining environment registers as a quality failure even when guests cannot precisely identify the cause. The aesthetic requirement was equally specific.
The Fremantle interior is modern, minimal and carefully considered. Speakers needed to integrate into the space without drawing attention — which ruled out larger format cabinets and required a compact, well-finished product that would not compromise the visual design of the restaurant.
The operational requirement was that bar and restaurant staff — not audio engineers — would manage the system day to day.
The bar team needed to switch between background music and BT Sports audio without technical complexity.
The private dining room needed independent control so that a group booking could adjust their own volume without affecting the rest of the restaurant.
And the system needed to be configured so that staff could manage all of this confidently without specialist knowledge.
The system
Middlesex Sound specified an Optimal Audio system centred on the Zone 4 controller, managing all four zones via onboard DSP with pre-configured speaker settings for each space.
Sixteen Cuboid 6 loudspeakers form the backbone of the system, distributed across the four zones to provide uniform coverage throughout.
The Cuboid 6 was the right product for this installation: it delivers a warm, balanced frequency response in a compact, clean-finished cabinet that integrates naturally into a hospitality interior without visual intrusion.
In more architecturally constrained areas of the layout, Cuboid 6TX and Cuboid 5 models supplemented coverage where transformer-balanced connections or a smaller footprint were needed.
The Zone 4’s HDMI pass-through handled the BT Sports TV package integration directly — routing the hotel’s sports broadcast audio into the bar zone without additional hardware or signal processing.
The bar team can switch to sports audio for a key fixture at the touch of a button on the ZonePad 4, without any configuration change. Staff control uses two ZonePad wall controllers alongside WebApp.
A ZonePad 4 at the bar gives the team access to all four zones from the primary staff workstation — adjusting volumes, switching sources and transitioning between service periods as required.
A ZonePad 1 in the private dining room gives that space independent control, allowing group bookings to adjust their own volume without affecting the bar or restaurant.
Day-to-day operation
The bar team manages the system via the ZonePad 4. Switching between background music and sports audio, adjusting volumes for different parts of the day, and managing the transition from a quiet lunch service to a busier evening are all single-touch operations at the bar workstation.
The private dining room operates independently — a birthday dinner in the private room and a rugby match in the bar run simultaneously without interfering with each other, each space managed from its own ZonePad.
Scheduled routines handle the transitions between service periods automatically. The system moves between configurations at set times without manual intervention from staff — the audio follows the rhythm of the restaurant without anyone having to manage it.
The outcome
Fremantle Bar and Restaurant operates across all four zones with consistent audio quality throughout — from the terrace to the private dining room — managed by bar and restaurant staff with no specialist audio knowledge.
The HDMI sports integration works seamlessly. The Cuboid 6 meets the aesthetic brief: the speakers integrate cleanly into the Fremantle interior without competing with the design.
Explore further
Audio systems for hotels
See system design examples and recommended specifications for hotel public areas, bars and restaurants.
How to choose the right speakers
Why the Cuboid 8 works without a subwoofer — and when to specify a sub for your application.
Browse all case studies
Real Optimal Audio installations across hospitality, hotel, retail, education and more.
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