A privately-operated venue in Hamburg, the Altonaer Theatre specialises in adapting literary works for the stage – ranging from classics and international bestsellers, to new German literature. As part of a recent modernisation, it has installed a new sound system, based around Alcons loudspeaker technology.

The requirements for a new house system were – as is usual for theatre – complex. First, the entire auditorium required even sound coverage without additional speakers and delay lines. Speech, music and effects were high on the list of priorities, but because the theatre also hosts musicals, additional emphasis had to be placed on intelligibility. As a result, two systems have been set up and calibrated. Protones event technology from Lüneburg was responsible for the technical service of the project.

The theatre settled on two flown arrays of five Alcons LR7 each with two BF302i installed underneath the stage for low-frequency support. Alcons ALC2 and ALC4 with DDP (Digital Drive Processor) were used for system drive and amplification. ‘The sound and vocal intelligibility of the LR7 is immaculate and significantly better than that of a comparative system,’ reports Altonaer Theater Technical Director, Andreas Meyer-Delius. ‘In addition, the Alcons system has a uniform signal transmission in all frequency ranges, without the so-called “beauty dent” in the 1kHz range. This gives the engineer greater freedom in the soundscaping.’

‘It is a discrete system that provides a very high speech intelligibility,’ adds Protones Project Manager, Dirk Dechring , ‘so the theatre production is in the foreground, not the technology.’

Stage successes such as Mephisto, Schiller’s Complete Works... Slightly Shortened or bestsellers such as Measuring the World and The Hundred-year-old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared have already achieved cult status using the new system.