The U.S. tour of “SIX” the musical, a British pop musical written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss that’s based on the lives of King Henry VIII’s six wives, sees sound designer Paul Gatehouse employing a main sound reinforcement system headed by the d&b audiotechnik XSL Series of loudspeakers joined by supporting components.
“I’ve been a long time d&b user and the range always brings something to the party. I love the texture that d&b speakers provide, it always sounds exciting to me, and the holistic workflow from design to deployment is something that suits my working style,” says Gatehouse, adding that the SL Series’ broadband directivity and control would be the right fit to adapt to the production’s needs. “Along the show’s development we’ve used progressively larger models in the d&b range, I had previously used the KSL System and really enjoyed the directivity in the low frequencies. When the same technology came as a more compact package that we could effectively use in theater spaces-we jumped on it.”
The system includes 24 XSL8 elements for the main proscenium system along with 12 V-SUB cardioid subwoofers flown in horizontal pairs along a sub array, bolster4ed SL-Sub INFRA subwoofers and a package of fill and delay loudspeakers from across the V & E series ranges.
“The LF directivity suits our show perfectly, having a less omnidirectional source interacting with the room improves the clarity across so many aspects of the sound,” continues Gatehouse. “It’s not just the sub-low content which is clean, it’s also in the low mid range, where reflections within the room can become boomy and indistinct. XSL cleans this up, thus the vocal clarity and space is even more defined. For touring purposes, the XSL8 arrays were mounted into pre-rigged custom tower sections that can stack easily during load in. The towers were designed by our roduction sound engineer Dillon Cody.
“Team members from every department including management and producers noticed a marked uplift in sound quality for this production, just from changing to XSL. We were fortunate to have some of the first units off the production line and using the XSL System really enabled us to raise our game.”
