The Norwegian port of Langesund annually plays host to the annual Skjærgårdsgospel worship conference, a weekend-long festival of music and meetings, with Alcons Audio equipment helping to overcome the event’s difficult acoustics over the past three years at Langesund’s Skjærgårdshallen, a multi-purpose arena and conference facility.
“It’s a difficult event for sound reinforcement, because the side and rear walls of Skjærgårdshallen are highly reflective. It’s made worse by the fact that the Skjærgårdsgospel stage is located on one of the ‘long’ sides,” says Eivind Fossnes Dahl, general manager and sound engineer at Audiopol Live, the company tasked with the event’s sound production.
Founded in 2007, Audiopol Live is a sister business to recording facility Audiopol Studio, based in Skien. “We supply all kinds of events, but mainly jazz, acoustic music, worship, choir, theatre and musicals, all of which require high resolution and speech intelligibility,” says Eivind. “We have no attachment to any manufacturer. When we buy equipment, our only criteria is that we want systems that can do the job in the best possible way.
“We listened to many different loudspeaker systems and chose the Alcons LR16 compact pro-ribbon line-array system purely because we knew it would be the right choice for the events we service,” he continues. “It has been such a success that we have since supplemented it with LR7 micro line-array, VR12 and VR8 compact monitor systems. We have never regretted choosing Alcons.”
Having known the Skjærgårdssgospel worship leaders for many years, three years ago Audiopol Live was asked to supply the audio system for the event. They—and an Alcons system—have been fixtures ever since.
“They were well aware of the audio quality that Alcons systems deliver before they asked us to get involved and now every year it is just assumed that Alcons is what we will use,” says Eivind. “Alcons is an excellent solution; because of the very fast transient response of the pro-ribbon’s mid-and high frequencies, the intelligibility is excellent, even with such difficult acoustics.
“Meanwhile, the horizontal spread is so clear and sharp that you can be very accurate with which zones you want the speakers to cover, while other zones will be silent,” he adds. “Setting up the cardioid subs as a end-fire array also means that the rearward low frequency reflections don’t cause a problem.”
This was the first year that AudioPol live had used Alcons Sentinel amplified loudspeaker controllers at Skjærgårdsgospel, and Eivind is pleased with how they performed.
“We have used Alcons ALC amplified loudspeaker controllers from the beginning and been very happy with what they provide,” he concludes. “So, we have been excited about how the new Sentinel amplifiers could compare to the ALCs. We found that the sound quality was every bit as good, but with the weight of an amplifier rack being about 10 percent of an ALC rack and the integrated digital system-drive processing, it made our job a lot easier.”