While line source loudspeakers have been around for more than 50 years, they’ve experienced a renaissance over the past decade, largely due to significant design advances that include digitally steerable models with individual amplification, delay and EQ for each driver, allowing the column’s vertical coverage to be tilted down (or up) and focused for short or long throws.
Most often, both passive and active line sources are deployed in reverberant spaces, where their controlled coverage and coherent sound in the vocal range are big advantages.
Long viewed as “church columns,” steady increases in performance quality are making these unique loudspeakers well suited for certain performing arts applications, as evidenced by these two recent projects.
City Concert Hall
This historic building in Leiden, The Netherlands, houses several multipurpose rooms, including the 19th century 838-seat Great Hall and the new 349-seat Aalmarkt Hall, and both were recently outfitted with new sound reinforcement systems headed by Renkus-Heinz IC Live digitally steerable loudspeakers.
The objective was to expand the ability of both venues to host a wide range of uses, ranging from jazz and classical concerts and stage musicals to corporate presentations and lectures.
Project manager Reinier Bruijns of TM Audio (based in Utrecht, The Netherlands) explains that although the client’s original tender had called for separate speech and music systems in Aalmarkt Hall, “we felt an even better solution would be to combine the two functions in an IC Live system.
We then demonstrated IC Live in the Great Hall and showed management how the digital beam steering could achieve accurate vertical beam angles to cover seats all the way to the back at 30 meters (about 100 feet).
At the same time, we could keep reflections from the hard ceiling and rear wall.”
For the Great Hall, another appealing aspect of the loudspeakers is that they could be deployed as a portable system easy to store for classical shows and then set up within minutes whenever sound reinforcement is required.
“It allowed the client to utilize a solution provides excellent acoustic control and high power from a compact system, while avoiding the need to fly main or delay loudspeakers in a room where that would be very undesirable aesthetically,” Bruijns adds.
This loudspeaker set is made up of four dual-stacked ICL-R cabinets, linked via Ethercon cables, that clip into place on top of the matching IC215S-R subwoofers to cover the main seating area.
Coverage is extended with single ICL-R loudspeakers mounted at both sides at the front of the balcony.
