Walk into Aura, located discretely in St James Street, and the atmosphere is one of quality. Considering its pedigree, that's no surprise - co-owned by Malaysian entrepreneur Tony Fernandes, events and motorsport guru Jonny Dodge and supperclub owner Alberto Barbieri – Aura has a stack of creative talent behind it.

A private members club, Aura has a maximum capacity of 210 in its main room and the emphasis is very much on maintaining an intimate atmosphere – in everything except in respect to its sound. The club recently upgraded its main system – investing in the new d&b audiotechnik White Range. Alberto explains what they were looking to achieve:
"We wanted a system that could deliver a big sound without being in any way obvious, delivering a high SPL with an even sound and clarity. The objective is to surprise our clients by the quality and depth of the sound, despite the size of our venue. I have always been impressed with the d&b audiotechnik brand, having used a variety of its systems before – and as we already had some cabinets at the club, felt this was the right direction for us to take.

"We were recommended to Orbital, who took on the challenge and installed a brand new range. The results are truly impressive – discretely placed, compact cabinets that pack an amazing punch despite their size. The new system copes well with our wide-ranging mix of musical styles, which typically covers everything from R&B to hip hop."

Orbital specified the new d&b White Range, representing one of the UK's first club installations to use the new system. Tom Byrne and David Bartholomeusz installed a combination of D12 and D6 amplifiers with Q-Sub, 10S-D, 8S and 5S loudspeakers – together with a Ci80 DJ monitor. For Tom, the White Range was the ideal choice for Aura, giving clarity throughout and high SPL levels without distortion:
"With the club's layout, the loudspeaker placement wasn't immediately obvious, but the key to the install was to ensure that the speakers wouldn't be obvious to the clients. This is a real advantage with d&b – the efficiency and high SPL you can achieve from such a small loudspeaker is impressive. Whereas we might have used a 12" cabinet from another manufacturer, with the White Range we were able to use a 10" loudspeaker (the 10S-D) and simply adopted this formula for all the speakers in the club. They already had a couple of Q-Subs, so we augmented these to give the low-end stomach punch they wanted to achieve. Setting up the system could only be done on a busy Friday night - by using the d&b R1 and the BSS Soundweb Blu editor, we were able to EQ the venue wirelessly from the middle of the room through VNC and an iPhone. This would have been virtually impossible in the past!"