The Baltic coastal resort town of Palanga has equipped its concert hall with an Outline audio system to handle the diverse demands of a contemporary performance space.
The Palangos Concert Hall was completed in 2015 with a capacity of 2,200 seats, its near-circular design providing both intimacy and space for a range of productions including concerts, festivals, TV projects, theatrical performances, conferences and other events. Specified and installed by Outline’s Lithuania distributor No Noise LT under the guidance of CEOs Kestutis Dulinskas and Linas Kazlauskas, the system draws extensively on Outline’s portfolio and features the Superfly compact line-source module.
The brief from the client was very specific, demanding powerful but unobtrusive sound reinforcement that would provide smooth, even coverage for the entire room. Using a combination of CAD 3D files, Outline’s Open Array 3D prediction/analysis software and experience of earlier shows in the venue enabled Dulinskas to make a shrewd assessment of the venue’s needs.
‘The audio configuration is not simple, because of the size and shape of the room,’ he explains. The main LR arrays comprise 12 Superfly plus six Mantas 28 per side, with Superfly cabinets working as far-field boxes for the balcony while the Mantas are effectively down fill speakers, mainly covering the lower parts of the hall. It may seem like a lot of speakers for this size of venue, but we need them to cover the nearly 90° vertical audience geometry. At the same time we have a good vertical dispersion control which avoids reflections from the ceiling.
‘The hardest part of the design phase was to find the best subwoofer configuration for this venue,’ he continues. ‘We started with a central cluster of eight DBS 18-2 subwoofers but this was not successful due to strong reflection from the ceiling, which cancels a lot of energy in the audience area. After extensive measurements and listening tests we decided to fly LR subs, five per side, with an additional sub on the ground for the very first rows. This design works very well for the arena.’
Beyond the main LR system, Outline Spectra and Vegas 12 CX modules are installed for out fill, Vegas 12 CX are used for under-balcony fills, while yet more Mantas 28s provide in fill and front fill. The system is powered by eight Outline X8 Dante-equipped amplifiers with overall system control is provided by an Outline Newton 16+8 digital hub.
‘For this particular place we needed a pretty compact but very powerful loudspeaker system and Outline’s Superfly looks perfect in this place,’ Dulinskas comments. ‘For us, Outline is a very professional company with great products and the new Superfly performs like a high-end system. It requires four channels of amplification while most competitors in this range of speakers are using cost effective two-way design boxes, which just cannot compete with Superfly for audio quality. Superfly’s three-way design was a major factor in our choice.’
‘I think the client is very happy,’ he concludes. ‘Now every show in this place will sound good from a PA aspect and the coverage is pretty good too. For a visiting rental company, it is not possible to set up a sound system like this in the few hours they have before a show which means that all guest sound companies and engineers can now spend much more time on mixing their show, not in designing a PA. Even from the first shows after the installation was finished, visiting engineers were impressed by sound quality, coverage and power of the Outline system.’
