Goen worked with Schartoff and Chris Barbee of lighting contractor Bandit Lites to design and build a new truss ring over the stage with six hangs of six JBL VerTec VT4887A compact line array loudspeakers, powered by Crown I-Tech 4x3500HD multichannel amplifiers.
Because the theater is in the round, Goen realized distributed cardioid clusters of subwoofers weren’t going to work. “You’d get a response plot that looked like a raspberry instead of an apple,” he said. In response, Clair Brothers opted for a central cluster of six JBL STX828S subwoofers in a triangular stack, driven by three Crown I-Tech 12000HD amps.
Clair Brothers was able to use the existing front and stage fill loudspeakers, which are linked to the main system via a BSS Audio BLU-160 signal processor with digital audio bus. The VT4887A clusters can be used either as three alternating stereo pairs or in mono depending on the preferences of the FOH mixer and artist. An added benefit is that the new truss ring is smaller and doesn’t block the sightlines across the venue, making the hall seem bigger than it was before.
“We wanted every listener to hear one clear and coherent sound source no matter where they were sitting, and that’s what the VT4887A line arrays deliver,” Goen states. “Thanks to their smooth, controlled dispersion pattern, the coverage is seamless from the first row to the back in 95 percent of the room.”
Goen considers VerTec and Crown I-Tech HD amplifiers to be a great combination since the amps’ DSP incorporates VerTec V5 preset tunings. “The V5 presets really bring the VerTecs to life and make them sound like a whole new loudspeaker.”
JBL HiQnet Performance Manager software is in place to calibrate and control the system. “Performance Manager helped us get everything up and running fast,” Goen says. “We had to be ready in time for a show by Lee Brice so there was no slack. We didn’t get a chance to test the wiring until two days before the show.” The system didn’t require a lot of tweaking—Goen noted that the VerTecs sounded great out of the box and that tuning was more a matter of gain shading than applying EQ. “We had two days to ring out the system, tune it and train the house engineers, and we did it.”
“Horizontal coverage is seamless all around the ring, the low end is solid and even around the room and yes, it sounds great at front of house,” Goen concludes. “In fact, front of house engineer Charlie Trantum has been working at Westbury for more than 20 years and he was very impressed when he first heard the new system.”
Clair Brothers
JBL Professional
Crown Audio
BSS Audio
Harman Professional