Danish cultural venue Værket has upgraded to L-Acoustics L Series for uniform coverage across its multi-level main hall.
The city of Randers built the site as the city’s electricity plant in 1906, and in 1990, Randers Municipality converted it into the performing arts complex that it is today. The complex now runs from an 1887 riding hall to an outdoor stage for several thousand people, and its programme takes in theatre, musicals, lectures, classical concerts and contemporary touring
productions.
The Store Sal is the biggest indoor room on the site. It seats 1,005 across a stalls floor, a first balcony, an upper balcony and side balconies, and it changes shape with the programme, becoming a 400-seat theatre one week, a classical concert hall the next, or opening its orchestra pit for opera, ballet and large-scale concerts. Opening the pit
moves the nearest seats back, so the front of the system has a different job on an opera night than on a theatre night.
All of that ran on an L-Acoustics ARCS II system originally installed in 2016. Across a programme that moves from the spoken word to full-scale concerts, Værket wanted every seat brought up to the same standard, and
the case was commercial as much as artistic. The brief pulled in two directions at once. The system had to deliver uniform horizontal and vertical coverage across all four seating levels, with speech intelligibility to match and headroom for high-dynamic-range concert productions. It also had to all but disappear. Nothing could cross a sightline from the side balconies, and nothing could sit
heavily inside a converted power station.
Værket turned to L-Acoustics Certified Provider Matrix Sales, a long-standing partner of the venue, which designed, supplied and installed the new system and trained the in-house technical team on it.
The multi-level layout set the puzzle. One system had to reach the stalls, the first balcony, the upper balcony and the side balconies with
the same response, without crossing a sightline or imposing on the room, and the rigging allowed a single suspension point for the flown subwoofers. L2D answered both halves of the brief at once. Its progressive vertical directivity carries the same response from the stalls to the upper balcony, and the compact format delivers that performance from an enclosure small enough to
leave every side-balcony sightline clear.
Two L2D on either side of the stage cover the stalls and the first balcony, with six KS21 flown directly behind them in two groups of three on a custom-fabricated bracket that makes the single suspension point work. Three further KS21 can be deployed at stage or floor level when a production wants more weight at
the bottom. Five A10 Focus serve the upper balcony and the upper side balconies, and ten X8 fill the front rows and the front side balconies. Twelve X12 are on hand for stage monitors. A P1 processor, two LA7.16i, two LA12X and six LA4X amplified controllers power the system, while six LS10 switches run Milan-AVB with full redundancy.
Low-frequency energy on
stage is controlled from both ends of the system. The KS21 are physically configured in cardioid, while L2D with inherent cardioid can be configured and reconfigured by presets. Performers get a noticeably cleaner field to work in.
A single preset recall switches the system between coverage settings to suit the hall configuration in use, including the performances that open the orchestra pit.