A full JBL Professional sound system has powered a staging of Jesus Christ Superstar at Dunedin’s Regent Theatre.
The Regent Theatre, with its ornate baroque-revival interior and 1600 seats is a landmark in its own right. But for sound engineers, its scale and architecture present a serious challenge. How do you make sure every audience member from the front row to the circle under the balcony, hears every word and every note with the same intensity?
That task fell to the team from Strawberry who supplied the sound equipment, with system engineering led by Dave Bennet. “In a theatre like the Regent the challenge is covering all the seats while staying out of the sightlines,” Bennet explains. “You can’t just hang giant speaker arrays in front of the stage and those beautiful views. Instead we used a mix of flown and ground-stacked arrays, discreet under-balcony fills and a few spot fills for the tricky areas.”
The main left and right arrays consisted of three VTX B18 subs with four VTX A8s per side, ground-stacked neatly beneath the proscenium to avoid sightline issues. Additional hangs of four VTX A8s per side covered the circle, while a centre cluster of eight Vertec VT4886s was dedicated to vocals.
Six AC25s provided under-balcony dialogue coverage, suspended discreetly from the circle’s front lighting rail, while SRX712s were called in for difficult pockets of coverage and as stage foldback. Everything ran from Crown I-Tech 4x3500 amplifiers, with JBL Performance Manager providing system control and tuning.