L-Acoustics’ K3 line array was recently installed at OM, a live music venue in Seraing, in Belgium’s French-speaking Wallonia region, housed in a 1948 building originally designed as a banquet hall for workers at the Cockerill steel complex.
Originally opened in October 2023 by the team behind the world-famous Liège festival Les Ardentes, in Belgium, OM’s main room holds up to 1,700 people and programmes genres spanning metal, jazz, techno and hip-hop, making it the largest and most versatile live music venue in the region. L-Acoustics Certified Provider XLR was brought in to design and deploy the system.
The brief called for festival-grade sound pressure levels and full-bandwidth coverage without visually dominating the space or relying on extensive subwoofer deployment. K3, rated 40Hz to 20kHz with no external subwoofer dependency, was specified to meet both requirements. The main system centres on two hangs of eight K3 per side, the install variant of the product, with four KS28 subwoofers per side flown alongside the main arrays rather than ground-stacked. A pair of X12 speakers address near-field in-fill areas, while four A10 Wide units serve as front-fills, with amplification supplied by six LA12X units.
XLR used L-Acoustics’ Soundvision software to model the system and refine speaker positions ahead of installation, given the acoustic challenges posed by the venue’s 1950s design.
Louis Lukusa, CEO of XLR, said: “With eight K3 per side, we could cover 100 per cent of the audience area without a single delay speaker. We achieved about 3dB distribution across the full audience and a sound integrity figure of almost 93 per cent. We were incredibly impressed with these figures for a venue of OM’s size.”
Lukusa added: “K3 was the logical answer. It’s the newest system in the range, and it comes with full bandwidth and native contour built in – that changes everything in a venue like this. We didn’t have to rely on additional subwoofer deployment to fill out the low end.”
Fabrice Lamproye, team coordinator and booking agent at OM, said the venue had worked with L-Acoustics for several years prior to the K3 installation.
He said: “We’re thrilled with the new K3 system. It’s very exact, and that helps you in a space where the acoustics aren’t perfect. It gives you the control to manage what the room throws at you.”
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