The Warner Theatre in Washington, DC, an 1,847-capacity live performance venue on Pennsylvania Avenue that originally opened in 1924 and was fully restored in the early 1990s, has been outfitted with a new sound reinforcement system headed by Superfly arrays and supporting components from Outline.
The new system replaces a previous iteration that utlized Outline Butterfly arrays, and was specified under the direction of house sound engineer Ishai Ratz. Jason Farah of Outline’s U.S. office says, “Following on the success of Butterfly and wanting to maintain the high performance-to-small footprint ratio, it made perfect sense to upgrade to Butterfly’s successor, Superfly. Superfly provides extended low-end response and improved rigging, while maintaining the same voicing that Butterfly excelled at.”
“The Warner Theatre has a prominent and deep under balcony section, so we specified left-right hangs of 14 Superfly per side to achieve the necessary coverage. The hangs are zoned to accommodate the varying distances between the loudspeakers and the seats, so the top six Superfly are focused on the balcony and the lower eight cover the entire floor, including all the way back to the rear of the under balcony area.”
Overall, the system comprises 28 Superfly enclosures joined by four compact Vegas 24 cabinets deployed as stage fills, two Ki12 Plus cabinets per side as near fills, and five DBS 18-2 subwoofers. Audio power is provided by seven Outline GTA Otto eight-channel DSP-equipped amplifiers, while a Newton FPGA-based processor is located at front of house to handle signal distribution and to interface guest consoles into the system.
“The FOH mix position is at the very back of the under balcony seating and normally such a location would necessitate reference monitors to compensate for the less-than-ideal listening experience back there,” Farah adds. “However, by using Outline’s OpenArray2 simulation software and through some careful deployment of the flown Superfly cabinets we were able to achieve smooth and even coverage throughout, even at the worst seat in the house – the FOH mix position!”
Ratz concludes, “We also added a Midas HD96 as our FOH console, and to me the combination of Midas, Newton and Superfly is an amazing sound system for the venue.”
