The clamshell roof above and trapezoidal frame around the stage that characterise the Sinnissippi Music Shell at Sinnissippi Park in Rockford, Illinois, are the kinds of architectural statements that often bring acoustic challenges. The recent Music in the Park festival proved the venue to be no exception.

Beginning in June with the Phantom Regiment Drum & Bugle Corps and runs through August with the Funk, Party and Dance Band, and hosts artists performing genres from rock to bluegrass to zydeco to everything in between – Clearwing Productions called on an L-Acoustics Kiva II to cover every seat and withstand the highly exposed location.

The system comprised ten Kiva II loudspeakers flown below three SB15m subs in a single centre-hung array, with two SB18m subs on the stage, all powered by three LA4X amplified controllers. That single hang is able to cover  the venue, plus grass sitting areas on the sides and at the top of the hill opposite the stage.

‘Ideally, you’d always like to have a left-right stereo system, with a hang on either side of the stage, but it doesn’t always work out that way,’ says Mik Moore, systems design engineer at Clearwing Productions. ‘At Sinnissippi Park, given the architecture and the load-bearing limits we faced with this kind of stage design, we had to work with just one line array. Because the seating areas are wide and extend up a hill behind the fixed seats, it was more of a challenge than it looked.’

That challenge was addressed by the L-Acoustics Kiva II ultra-compact modular line array, which generates symmetric horizontal coverage of 100° without secondary lobes over the entire frequency range. And at 31lb per module, the Kiva II allowed Moore to design a full-spectrum system that covered all of the seating areas consistently and clearly, without putting undue stress on the venue’s support infrastructure and still allowing three 15-inch subwoofers atop the hang.

‘The horizontal dispersion pattern of the Kiva II is fantastic,’ says Moore. ‘One of the first big shows of the series had more than 3,000 people in the seats and more on the grass around them, and the producers told us that everyone heard everything, even off the side and on top of the hill, thanks to the extra 6dB the Kiva II gives us. Like all the L-Acoustics systems we use at Clearwing, we chose the Kiva II because it offered the most versatile solution for a challenging project.’