The Royal Masonic School for Girls, a prestigious independent day and boarding school in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, UK, founded in 1788, recently added an L-Acoustics sound system to improve its Great Hall’s acoustic capabilities. The Great Hall, with its ornate plaster ceiling, is the heart of the school’s daily activities, hosting assemblies and special events, but has suffered from a highly reverberant environment.
Following a previous installation of an L-Acoustics A Series system in the school’s performance venue known as The Space, the Royal Masonic School for Girls again selected L-Acoustics certified provider Adlib for this new installation.
The primary technical challenge with the Great Hall lay in overcoming the reverberation, which had historically rendered both amplified and natural speech nearly unintelligible. The installation team faced the delicate task of creating flying points that would fulfil the acoustic requirements while preserving the integrity of the recently-restored moulded plaster ceiling.
Adlib successfully mounted the main arrays while employing creative solutions for delay loudspeakers, utilising existing chandelier mounts to serve as non-structural tie-off points to set the azimuth angle, negating any requirement for additional penetrations through the ceiling.
L-Acoustics Soundvision played a crucial role in the system design process, enabling Adlib to experiment with various configurations, during the design process. The resulting configuration maximises the ratio of direct to reverberant sound, ensuring consistent coverage throughout the hall.
The installation comprises left and right hangs of eight Kiva II variable curvature line source loudspeakers providing primary coverage, complemented by two SB15m compact subwoofers at the top of each hang, for extended low-frequency performance.
The system is further enhanced by two flown A10i Wide constant curvature line source enclosures and six 5XT point source loudspeakers spaced on the ground at the front of the stage At the heart of the system is the LA7.16i multi-channel amplified controller with AES67 networking technology.
Tim Robinson, senior applications engineer at Adlib explained: “The aim was to provide a future-proof system which could provide accurate coverage throughout the space with adequate headroom and frequency response for media playback, as well as the possible future use as a performance space.”
Robinson added: “The significantly improved speech intelligibility has made the Great Hall a more comfortable and flexible environment, allowing the school to host events beyond school assemblies. It has opened new possibilities for the space’s use, with the capability to support performance activities in the future through additional subwoofer integration if desired.”
