Ghent's Club Wintercircus has installed a full L-Acoustics L-ISA installation inside a Belgian venue to deliver concert-grade immersive audio for nightlife and live music.
Club Wintercircus is located within one of Belgium's most historic structures in the heart of Ghent, the venue was conceived as a premium destination for both nightlife and live music.
When Viernulvier and Democrazy, two of Ghent's leading cultural organisations, launched the project, their brief was to deliver a best-in-class immersive audio experience that could hold its own under any conditions.
L-Acoustics Certified Partner XLR, a Belgian integration specialist, won the tender in 2024. Their answer to the brief was an L-Acoustics L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound installation. Their design is a full object-based installation that places every person in the 550-capacity room at the centre of the performance, regardless of where they're standing.
The Wintercircus building is a landmark in Ghent, a 19th-century circular structure that is part of a larger heritage redevelopment project. The club itself, however, is entirely new: purpose-built for live music and nightlife, with acoustics baked into the design from day one rather than retrofitted as an afterthought.
That circular geometry, while architecturally striking, is an acoustic challenge in its own right. Reflections and standing waves are inherent to the shape, and XLR had to model and manage them carefully. Microphone positions during calibration were chosen with the room's geometry in mind to achieve natural, balanced coverage across the entire floor.
Soundvision, with its L-ISA extension, was central to the design process, allowing XLR to visualise spatial imaging, assess immersive coverage, and refine the system long before a single cabinet was hung. The main front-of-house configuration features five hangs of A10i loudspeakers, each comprising three A10i Focus and one A10i Wide — a combination that delivers even tonal coverage and consistent dispersion across the audience area.
Subwoofers are positioned underneath the stage, a deliberate design choice that keeps them entirely hidden from view while maintaining powerful, clean low-frequency reinforcement. Eight KS21i units, arranged in a lightly arced configuration, provide smooth bass distribution without compromising the venue's visual aesthetic.
Immersion beyond the front plane is delivered by eleven X12 loudspeakers for surround reinforcement and eleven X8 units deployed as elevation channels, enabling precise object-based placement of sound in three dimensions. An L-ISA Processor using 32 outputs drives the spatial engine, while the system is powered by three LA7.16i and one LA4X amplified controllers.
A P1 processor is used to bring a stereo input onto the Milan-AVB network, allowing visiting engineers to feed a simple left-right signal directly into the system when full immersive processing isn’t required. This provides a straightforward workflow for touring engineers while maintaining compatibility with the venue’s L-ISA configuration.
The system runs entirely on a Milan-AVB network backbone, managed via two LS10 switches and integrated into an Agora MK2 Ghost switch infrastructure that carries AVB, Dante, and GigaAce traffic as a converged network over fully redundant 10-gigabit fibre. The AVB boundary clock built into the Agora switch ensures synchronisation across the entire network with imperceptible latency.
At the console, an Allen & Heath dLive handles source management and format conversion, feeding the L-ISA Processor via MADI.