The new design greatly reduced the vertical and horizontal profile of the arrays, creating a sleek, compact system. Lacina presented the idea to both Kenton Forsythe, Co-Founder of EAW and Senior VP of Engineering, and Joe Fustolo, EAW Director of the Strategic Engineering Group.
They agreed it could be done, and that there was also an opportunity to minimize the distance between the acoustic centers of the adjoining mid-high components. Thus the AX-SY was born.
A final tweak to the design was a 30-degree angle at the top of the cabinet to get the loudspeakers up as high above the stage as possible. To handle the lows, now that the woofers had been separated out, Forsythe, Fustolo and Lacina decided on the EAW SB625z medium-format single-15-inch subwoofer, which was to be placed above each pair of high-mids.
Then between each of the L-C-R dual 15-inch mid bass cabs, there would be two dual-18-inch subwoofers, all hidden from view behind an acoustically transparent scrim in the proscenium.
“The beauty of the design is that all of the big low frequency boxes are completely hidden behind the scrim, so the P.A. would look petite but sound huge and effortless,” Lacina explains.
Yoshi’s would also add other elements to its sound system, including the first installation of the then-brand new EAW MicroWedge, which turned out to be so successful (thanks to its small footprint, large output and high phase coherency) a dozen more MW12s and MW15s were purchased for its Oakland venue.
And the installation would also be the most extensive use at the time of EAW UX8800 processors, with a total of five units providing 40 channels of processing output.
