The Stifel Theatre, a historic, 3,100 seat theatre in St. Louis, Missouri has made significant improvements to the guest experience, by including a d&b audiotechnik KSL loudspeaker system, installed by Spectrum Sound, Nashville.
“All venues have their own set of unique challenges when it comes to designing and implementing house PA,” states Ken DeBelius, system integration sales manager for Spectrum. “Stifel Theatre, while beautiful aesthetically, had some typical acoustical challenges with some significant hard reflections that could be exacerbated by amplified PA. This was one of the reasons why we chose the d&b audiotechnik KSL-Series for this space; the very controlled polar directivity of KSL minimised the amount of wasted energy that typically excites the room in bad ways with ordinary loudspeaker systems. During the initial deployment of the rig, everyone was instantly amazed at how well it sounded right out of the gate without even doing much system tuning. It simply sounded great from the start.”
The staff at Stifel Theatre expressed the desire to have an auxiliary center full-range cluster that could be used both with the main Left/Right KSL arrays, or alone for simpler talking heads shows. “For this, DeBelius says, “we elected to use the d&b A-Series Augmented Array product. These are suspended directly below the center flown subwoofer array using a custom designed/fabricated adaptor from the d&b custom shop. Despite their small footprint, they keep up with the main KSL arrays remarkably well.”
d&b A-Series combines the ease of point source clusters with the level and frequency distribution of line arrays, delivering signature d&b sonic quality in an augmented format. It can be deployed vertically or horizontally, and its coverage is adjustable to meet its requirements.
d&b ArrayProcessing was implemented in this project, and DeBelius said he rarely installs any d&b systems without ArrayProcessing. “The benefits in smoothing the tonal response across the seating planes are totally worth the extra amplifier channels needed. It also greatly assisted providing good coverage into the balcony without excessive level loss, right up to the very top of the high balcony seating without having to resort to separate upper balcony delay fills.”
The KSL configuration consists of 8 x KSL8, 16 x KSL12, 4 x KSL-SUBs (center, flown SUB array), 4 x SL-GSUBs (portable floor SUBs for the deck), 18 x 40D amplifiers, 2 x D80 amplifiers, 8 x 44S loudspeakers for front fills, 3 x DS10 Dante network bridge, 4 x Yi7P point source loudspeakers for under balcony delay fills, 1 x AL60 and 3 x AL90 A-Series loudspeakers, and 2 x M6 wedge monitors.