First dedicated in 1996, the $9m PPAC is home to IWU's music and theatre departments and serves as the cultural centre of the university, hosting concerts, recitals, theatre, lectures, youth conferences and more. And although the facility boasts one of Indiana's most prestigious architectural design awards, it was widely felt that Phillippe Auditorium's original sound system - designed as a distributed speech reinforcement system - lacked the SPL, stereo capabilities and fidelity necessary for modern touring productions.
With such a broad range of events held in the space, SineWave Audio designed a hybrid system comprising left and right stereo arrays of 11 L-Acoustics Kara(i) enclosures flown below two SB18 subs, extending the range of the subs for music and playback, with a centre array of 15 compact Kiva enclosures primarily used for speech reinforcement.
Three more Kiva are positioned on the stage lip for front-fill, and four auxiliary-fed SB28 subs are available to maximize low-end impact when concerts are held in the room. Furthermore, six coaxial 12XT plus two self-powered 112P enclosures serve as stage monitors, and all loudspeakers (sans the 112P) are powered and processed by a combination of seven LA8 and two LA4X amplified controllers.
"Although Phillippe Auditorium is fairly 'well-behaved' in terms of acoustics, the drastic height of the balcony - both in terms of the farthest seating row and distance between the lower balcony and the floor listening areas - proved a bit challenging when initially thinking about a new system," notes SineWave Audio president and founder Micah Dean.
"However, L-Acoustics' Soundvision software enabled us to very accurately model the ideal number of Kara(i) and Kiva necessary to perfectly cover all of the seating areas, yet keep that energy away from reflective surfaces like the face of the balcony. The final result very closely matched the prediction and we achieved a measured variance of no more than +/-2dB throughout every seat in the house, which is fantastic."
(Jim Evans)
