From a small UK tour of an Edinburgh Fringe festival production, SIX the Musical has become an award-winning Broadway production and now a must-see show all across the US. Based on the lives of Henry VIII’s six wives, the production presents 500 years of historical heartbreak as a euphoric girl-power celebration of the 21st century.
For the tour, the production required a sound system that came in a compact package that could be efficiently used in different theatre spaces – while still delivering the low frequencies and the punchy low end needed for a high energy pop musical. Born from d&b audiotechnik’s SL Series, the XSL System proved a suitable option.
‘I’ve been a long-time d&b user and the range always brings something to the party,’ says sound designer, Paul Gatehouse. ‘I love the texture that d&b loudspeakers provide; it always sounds exciting to me. And the holistic workflow – from design to deployment – is something that really suits my working style.’
As SIX continued to expand, Gatehouse felt that d&b’s SL Series broadband directivity and control would be a great fit to adapt to the production’s needs. ‘Along the show’s development, we’ve used progressively larger models in the d&b range,’ Gatehouse says. ‘I had previously used the KSL System and enjoyed the directivity in the low frequencies. When the same technology came in a more compact package that we could effectively use in theatre spaces, we jumped on it.’
The show’s system includes 24 XSL8 elements for the main proscenium system, along with 12 V-Sub Cardioid Subwoofers flown in horizontal pairs along a sub array, SL-Sub Infra subwoofers and a package of fill and delay speakers from across the V and E series ranges.
‘The LF directivity suits our show perfectly, having a less omni-directional source interacting with the room improves the clarity across so many aspects of the sound,’ Gatehouse elaborates. ‘It’s not just the sub-low content which is clean, it’s also in the low mid range, where reflections within the room can become boomy and indistinct. XSL cleans this up, thus the vocal clarity and space is even more defined. For touring purposes, the XSL8 arrays were mounted into pre-rigged custom tower sections that can stack easily during load in. The towers were designed by our Production Sound Engineer, Dillon Cody.
‘Team members from every department including management and producers noticed a marked uplift in sound quality for this production, just from changing to XSL,’ he adds, ‘We were fortunate to have some of the first units off the production line and using the XSL System really enabled us to raise our game.’
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