The most recent edition of the Elbjazz Festival in Hamburg, Germany, which featured 44 acts on several stages located in and around the city’s harbor, was supported by Hamburg-based production company PM Blue, which opted to deploy Alcons Audio pro-ribbon loudspeakers on three stages for audiences of up to 15,000.
Stages outfitted with Alcons components included “Am Helgen,” located on the property of the shipyard Blohm+Voss, the indoor location “Schiffbauhalle,” and the St. Katharinen church. It’s not the first time PM Blue has chosen Alcons for a jazz application, notes Lennart Wenzel, PM Blue senior project manager and production manager at Elbjazz.
“The Alcons systems are excellent for jazz and classical music,” he says. “The ribbon tweeters produce a very natural sound. The sound characteristics of the systems are beyond reproach and were totally impressive across the board at Elbjazz.”
The Am Helgen stage was served with 20 Alcons LR18 line array modules flown left-right joined by a dozen BC543 triple-18-inch subwoofers. with dual RR12 point source loudspeakers as infills and supplemented by four compact VR8 loudspeakers as nearfields. The delay lines were each equipped with eight LR7/120 micro pro-ribbon line array modules per side, positioned at the front of house level, with all loudspeakers driven by 10 Alcons Sentinel10 amplified loudspeaker controllers.
Meanwhile, the Schiffbauhalle, offering intensive concert experiences for several hundred spectators in an industrial setting, employed a system with 15 LR14 compact line array modules per side in the main hang and six LR7 per side as delay. At the edge of the stage, four VR8s were used as nearfields along with four BF302 mkII dual-15-inch subwoofers. All audio power and processing were supplied by six Sentinel10 units.
“The sound was very powerful and voluminous over the entire length of the Schiffbauhalle, with no details lost thanks to the pro ribbons,” says Ingo Schwarzer, operator and systems engineer at PM Systemhaus, who manned front of house. “From delicate chimes to sub-bass solos, every tone was reproduced flawlessly. For me, the Alcons system is the only one that is homogeneous across the entire dispersion range while consistently delivering high resolution.”
St. Katharinen at Hamburg harbor was supplied with sound by two QR36 modular pro-ribbon two-way column loudspeakers controlled by an Sentinel3. Phillip Buschhüter, FOH operator in charge at St. Katharinen, states, “My experience with the QR36 was positive all around. I had one QR36 each on the front left and right. I particularly liked the dispersion pattern because it didn’t open vertically, so we were able to use the maximum amount of direct sound without too many reflections from the church floor or the church vaults. The system sounded very linear right off the bat, so there was no need for extensive EQing other than HPF.”
Wenzel adds, “The Alcons QR speakers go through distance like a knife through butter. And in a church, you don’t have to put so much energy into the room. You basically only have to support those instruments that you can’t hear well.”
