Philadelphia, PA (August 31, 2026)—Philadelphia’s Highmark Mann Center for the Performing Arts now boasts an L-Acoustics L2D system for the two thirds of its audience who sit outside the TD Pavilion on the venue’s Great Lawn.
When Evan Rogers joined Highmark Mann five years ago as vice president and general manager, he set about understanding the legacy sound system properly before replacing it.
He spoke with with other venues, Live Nation and AEG, and looked at what tours carried for the main stage. Ultimately, he went with L-Acoustics, calling in Bauder Audio Systems, the brand’s local Certified Provider, for the job.
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Highmark Mann seats 4,500 under the roof of its TD Pavilion, and beyond the roofline, 2,000 more sit in the fixed seats of the Connelly Terrace. Past the terrace, the Great Lawn holds over 6,000, where Rogers wanted the sound to match the seated sections.
A total of four L-Acoustics L2D now fly at the back of the pavilion above the lawn, one enclosure per position. The team hung the boxes and ran cable in a single day, and Bauder’s lead system tech Craig “Junior” Kaufmann came back a few days later to tune the system.
“One of the reasons this lawn system went up so quickly is because there was an existing delay system there before, so the infrastructure for hanging these four different sources of lawn speakers was already there,” Kaufmann explains. “But the amount of sound we could fit into that pre-existing space is orders of magnitude higher now.”
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The arithmetic behind that is straightforward. Four hang points were already in place and could not be multiplied, so the question was how much output four positions could deliver. A single L2D carries 20 transducers in one enclosure, four 12-inch and eight 10-inch neodymium cone drivers with eight three-inch compression drivers, run by one 16-channel LA7.16i amplified controller. Covering the same ground with conventional six-enclosure hangs would have put 24 boxes on those same four points.
By this summer season’s conclusion, performers such as the Philadelphia Orchestra, BalletX, The Philly Pops, Bleachers, The Strokes, The Red Clay Strays, Three Pianos, Jack Johnson, Hilary Duff, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Sara McLachlan, Neil Young, Willie Nelson and Zac Brown will have used the new audio system at Highmark Mann.
