After railway access turned a quiet fishing village into one of Portugal’s original seaside resorts the town of Espinho had six casinos by the early 1900s. The tradition continues on Rua 19, its main thoroughfare, where Casino de Espinho has been one of the region’s entertainment landmarks since 1974. Its showpiece Salão Atlântico, recently calling on brought in SLS to install an new L-Acoustics sound system.
The 550-capacity hall hosts international headliners, gala banquets and conferences, with fashion shows, comedy nights, festivals and private functions in between. Keeping that calendar full means satisfying promoters, producers and corporate clients who each arrive with different expectations, in a room that is reconfigured between almost every booking.
‘The Salão Atlântico earns its keep through its versatility,’ confirms Pedro Santos, Northern Region Sales Manager at SLS. ‘It has to be ready for anything, and the sound has to perform in any one of a variety of layouts. Raising the technical standard of the room mattered to the clients who already trust us with their events, and it opens the door to new, more ambitious productions.’
The hall changes shape constantly, and the system had to sound the same in all of it. L2D covers the whole room from a single compact flown array each side of the stage, with uniform horizontal and vertical coverage that holds wherever the seating lands. Fewer enclosures also means a cleaner installation and open sightlines to the stage. SLS modelled the design in Soundvision, testing splay angles and rigging heights and validating SPL uniformity and speech intelligibility across every seat before a box was hung.
‘The main challenge was achieving uniform coverage in a multi-purpose venue with a variety of seating layouts and event configurations. Using Soundvision, we optimised the positioning of the L2 system to ensure consistent coverage across every audience area while carefully managing the interaction between the loudspeaker system, the room geometry, and its acoustic characteristics,’ Santos explains.
One L-Acoustics L2D is flown left and right of the stage as the main system. Four L-Acoustics KS28 subwoofers sit in a central ground stack along the stage front, and five L-Acoustics 5XT front fill lines the stage lip for the closest tables. L-Acoustics LA7.16i, LA12X and LA2Xi amplified controllers drive the system, with a P1 processor at the head of a native Milan-AVB network that keeps latency ultra-low and calls for no format converters.
Predictability is what the room trades on. Layouts change constantly, so the system has to be quick to reset and sound the same once it is. The casino’s technical team stayed involved through the whole implementation and moved to the new workflow quickly. Engineers and performers have singled out clarity, consistency of coverage and low-frequency impact, while management has picked out versatility and reliability across the full range of events the hall books. The platform scales as production demands change.
More: www.l-acoustics.com