Symphony Hall, home to the Boston Symphony Orchestra for more than 100 years, recently upgraded its house audio capabilities with a new L-Acoustics loudspeaker system.
Steve Colby, of New Hampshire-based Evening Audio Consultants, was selected to head up the retrofit. To assist him on the project, Colby, a senior sound engineer for the Boston Pops and frequent engineer and consultant for the Boston Symphony, chose to assemble a group of seasoned professionals, including both Mark Brosnan and John “Klon” Koehler of Greenfield, Mass.,-based Klondike Sound.
Colby said, “It’s essential that a sound system in this room be of exceptional fidelity, as the acoustic environment is very pristine and unforgiving of distortion and other undesirable P.A. artifacts. The system must also perform with the same quality as a fine musical instrument in order to blend convincingly with acoustic sound being produced onstage. Over many years of auditioning systems in this space, it was agreed between representatives of the artistic, management and engineering teams at the hall that L-Acoustics systems best satisfied this requirement.”
Suspended above the proscenium, the new system features a central cluster of seven L-Acoustics V-DOSC enclosures with a pair of dV-DOSC small-format/downfill array elements hung beneath. Both the V-DOSC and dV-DOSC array elements incorporate a patented DOSC waveguide to facilitate virtually seamless element-to-element coupling. The cluster is augmented on the ground by several portable stage systems, including a front-fill array featuring four MTD108a 8-inch coaxial cabinets mounted on stands and a deck-fill system of stage left/right groundstacks, each comprising a pair of dV-DOSC cabinets mounted on a dV-SUB triple-15 subwoofer. Adding to system versatility, the dV-DOSC deck-fills can be replaced as needed with a pair of MTD115a 15-inch coaxial cabinets for special lower-volume applications.
For more, visit www.l-acoustics-us.com.
