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KV2 Soars to new heights with Cirque du Soleil on Broadway

19/5/2016

NEW YORK – KV2 Audio is pleased to announce the opening of Cirque Du Soleil’s Broadway Musical - PARAMOUR.

Playing at the Lyric Theater, PARAMOUR features three stereo sets of ESR215 Full Range – one for each of the three levels of seating. For low end reinforcement, the installation features 4x VHD2.16 double 15” subwoofers flown from the balcony level truss, and two pairs of VHD1.21 double 21” subwoofers – one pair located in the box seating area of the dress circle and the other pair located in the orchestra pit. For fills, surrounds and imaging support, there are two SL412 three-way wide dispersion speakers alongside an extensive distributed network of ESD5 and EX6 fills.

The KV2 systems were specified for PARAMOUR by Tony Award winning sound designer John Shivers and long-time collaborator David Patridge in association with Masque Sound. Shivers and Patridge have previously specified ESR215 systems for KINKY BOOTS in Toronto, London and New York. ON DAS WUNDER VON BERN in Hamburg, Germany they put together a comprehensive system comprised of SL412, SL2.15 and a large number of EX6 and EX12 speakers for fills and surrounds.

“We continue to be very impressed by the horn design in both the ESR215 and SL412. It provides a very true 110ºx40º coverage with very little falloff around the edges and a clarity and coherency which is unparalleled in other products with a similar power rating,” says Patridge, adding “the ESR215 offers a really rich powerful low end which practically negates the need for subwoofers other than for extreme low-end extension."

With a seating capacity of 1,896 the Lyric is the second largest theater on Broadway – great for the acrobatics that Cirque du Soleil is famous for. While a line array would be the go-to choice for the majority of designers in such a space, Patridge explains, “Our major worry in shifting away from line array system designs was the lack of vertical pattern control on point source boxes and how the overlapping ESR215 coverage would interact within the room. We have grown used to being able to reduce the interactions of systems in the vertical domain by manipulating array geometry and certainly sound system alignment principals dictate that overlap is a bad thing generally. In truth, the shorter line arrays that we use in theatre don’t offer much pattern control in the low-mid and low frequency range and so we can only avoid overlap in the high end. This leads to a confluence of muddiness that can tend to overwhelm the clarity of the system and with point source, you get 100% of the frequencies overlapping! While the shorter wavelength frequencies suffer some cancellation effects in the overlapping zone, the precedence of SPL for each zone i.e. if you’re in the Orchestra Level, the overlap from the Dress Circle level will occur at lower SPL and therefore its importance to the ear is lessened vs the closer, higher SPL of the Orch. system. The ‘musicality' of the full-range overlapping signal is much less of an issue than we envisioned. Hey… it’s what we used to have before the line array and it wasn’t all that bad!”

PARAMOUR is an open ended production and has its official premiere May 25th. For tickets please visit paramouronbroadway.com.

KV2 Sound System setup: