Long Island City, NY - New York is the city that never sleeps, and the tiny island of Manhattan has never been able to contain the city's buzz. Just across the river, hip new neighborhoods spring up like dandelions - once-gritty enclaves like Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant are now home to the trendy elite. As locals are fond of pointing out, these areas have one thing Manhattan lacks: breathtaking views of the Manhattan skyline.

New York’s newest peripheral gem is Long Island City. Just a subway stop away in Queens, this aging warehouse district is now abuzz with nightlife, eateries, and fashionable hotels.

And the Z Hotel is a prime example: within months of its grand opening, the hotel boasts a 90 per cent occupancy. This former factory has been redesigned from the ground up, with chic décor from its airy rooftop bar to the intimate basement lounge and restaurant. Both venues feature sleek sound systems designed and installed by El Media Group, a Manhattan-based company that provides high-end boutique hotels and restaurants with both custom music and the sound systems to accompany it.

The rooftop lounge area is served by more than a dozen Community WET Series W2-218 all-weather two-way systems. “We opted for the WET Series mainly for their weather resistance,” explains El Media’s Andrew Mitchel. “But we were pleased to find that they have a nice tight coverage pattern as well. Even though the rooftop is 20 stories up and there are not a lot of immediate neighbors, we wanted to make sure that there wasn’t a lot of sound spilling over into the neighborhood.” Lab Gruppen C-Series amplifiers power the system.

Community’s VERIS Series covers the downstairs restaurant and lounge. The basement venue is outfitted with a distributed system featuring Community VERIS 26 two-way, dual 6-inch full-range systems, with VERIS 212S dual 12-inch subwoofers for added low-end punch. The loudspeakers are powered by Lab Gruppen C- and FP-Series amplification, with Symetrix Jupiter DSP providing system drive and processing.

“It’s a pretty nice sounding space,” says Mitchel. “It’s not very wide, but the room is pretty friendly – not a lot of parallel walls or reflective surfaces, plenty of soft seating and cushions, and the ceiling’s not too low like a lot of basement spaces. It’s a nice looking place too – they’ve opened up a large part of the space to the level above, so they’ve got a lot of natural light coming in. It’s a really nice room, and the VERIS speakers sound great in there.”