The Peace Center in Greenville, S.C., is a state-of-the-art performing arts campus boasting a multitude of venues and meeting spaces that welcome more than 200,000 patrons annually. Currently serving as home to the Greenville Symphony Orchestra, South Carolina Children’s Theatre, Carolina Ballet Theatre and International Ballet, the center has hosted performances by such acts as Johnny Mathis, Natalie Cole, Bill Cosby, David Copperfield and Itzhak Perlman, as well as touring Broadway productions of Phantom of the Opera and The Producers.
The center’s primary performance venue, the 2,100-seat Peace Concert Hall, was recently updated with the installation of a high-performance L-ACcoustics KUDO™ line source array loudspeaker system. Paragon Productions of Rock Hill, S.C., was charged with the system design and install for the venue. Paragon president Alan Smith recalls the early design phase: “In the beginning, our client had us looking at doing just the left and right arrays, with the intention of completing the system in segments. We did demo rigs for the V-DOSC and dV-DOSC, both of which were very impressive, but not exactly right for the space.” Of major concern to Peace Center production manager Shelby Wirt and master audio engineer David Courreges were the box seats on either side of the venue. Fortunately, Smith had the answer,: “KUDO,” he says. “I knew that was the way to solve this problem.”
Paragon staged a KUDO demo in the concert hall, allowing Wirt and Courreges to listen to the enclosures on the orchestra plane as a true stereo system, then as a mono system covering the entire room from one side of the stage. “They were very impressed and we knew the system did what they needed at that point. Coverage-wise, because of the variable geometry, it also gave them something powerful that worked within their various requirements,” notes Smith.
Once the demo design was put into place, the Peace Center brought in senior consultant Jonathan Darling from the acoustical firm Kirkegaard Associates to review the plans. Darling was pleased with the KUDO array and added his recommendations to treat the balcony as a completely separate delay zone using dV-DOSC enclosures and to add ARCS boxes as center-fills.
The crew at Paragon Productions, led by project manager Kelly Bristow, did a full install for the final system, from the wiring and rigging to tuning and timing. The final system comprises six KUDO enclosures per side for the house with a six-box ARCS array for center-fill, four dV-DOSCs per side addressing the balconies and four SB218 reference subwoofers “on the deck,” all powered by LA Series amps, plus the center’s 14 existing MTD112s and two MTD115 wedges for stage monitoring.
Upcoming events at the Peace Center Concert Hall include performances by Peter Frampton, Harry Connick Jr. and Sinbad, as well as the touring theatrical productions of Spamalot, Avenue Q, The Drowsy Chaperone, Sweeney Todd and the 50th anniversary tour of My Fair Lady.
Paragon Productions can be found at www.paragon-productions.com. For more information on the Peace Center, visit www.peacecenter.org. L-Acoustics can be found at www.l-acoustics.com.
