As part of its continuing commitment to its producers to ensure good vocal and light music audio across its venues, two Ambassador Theatre Group (ATG) theatres, the King’s Theatre Glasgow and the Bristol Hippodrome, have recently installed K-array loudspeaker systems as a visually discrete, yet acoustically powerful, solution. ATG is the world’s leading live-theatre company, with a total of 45 venues in Britain, the US and Australia. Its portfolio includes a number of the UK’s regional theatres, many of which are housed in historic buildings so, when the need to install house systems was identified, visual aesthetics as well as excellent audio quality was a key requirement. Stuart Graham, ATG’s Head of Technical Operations, is a driving force behind this move.
“There’s a big gap in the quality of how toured shows fill our auditoriums with sound, especially the shows that come for one day only and don’t have time to put delay systems in across our balconies. This means that we are potentially losing that sound if the house is full, or if people want to sit in seats that aren’t in the main part of the auditorium. As host venues, we want to aid that, but with a solution that works for every part of our business and we also needed to think about what happens when we want to include advertising before the show or during the interval. Without a house system, we have to rely on the visiting show’s PA system. If we want to generate revenue as a company, we need to have independent audio and not be reliant on visiting shows.” -Stuart Graham, ATG’s Head of Technical Operations
“We then looked at the usability of the system. Would it be the right thing to put a big line array system in? Probably not. So we looked at other systems. In our regional venues, 80% of the time a toured system will go in no matter what you have in there. That meant we needed to make a decision on what our investment should be and what is useful to us.”
“It’s a very discrete system. That was important to us. It needs to be permanent and for us to be confident that it won’t ever get in the way of the big shows that need to have first choice of where they position their boxes. The way it’s been installed, not only is it out of the way of the touring systems, but it’s positioned so that even when a line array is hung from the usual rigging points, it’s not obscured by them, so it still works whatever is in front of it.”
“It shoots out to the back of the balcony and underneath the shelf of the upper circle, which I was a little bit worried about. We’ve done a couple of shows with it and it’s worked very well. I’m very impressed with the coverage of the system from such small boxes.”