According to theatre designer Phil Joyce who specified the equipment for the Lighthouse Theatre, the principal criteria were performance and value for money. "Architectural Acoustics from Peavey might not be amongst the best-known brands in theatre-land, but to my mind, it offers one of the best price-performance ratios out there," remarked Joyce.
"Designed specifically for fixed installations it offers a great range of targeted, high quality products at a very attractive price point. In fact, combined with Crest amplifiers, we sourced our entire audio system from Peavey, including processing. The only exception was the console because we wanted a digital console, and Crest doesn't do one yet. All the rest came from the Peavey stable, and it sounds excellent."
For the main auditorium Joyce selected two pairs of ILS 1564V speakers to cover the balcony and main seating areas. The two-way design features a 15" low frequency driver and a 1.6" high frequency compression driver.
The Front of House system is equalised using the Crest Performance CPQ 2215 graphic equaliser. To serve the under-balcony area, Joyce opted for a pair of Peavey Impulse 2652 speakers which are delayed using the Peavey IDL1000 digital delay line and are powered with another Crest CPX900 amplifier. For the bar and foyer areas, Joyce specified a Peavey PZS 140RA integrated zoning mixer amplifier. "This is a particularly useful product," he noted. "You can assign up to five inputs to any of the four zone outputs with amplification all in 3U one box." Finally, a Peavey UMA1502 100v line mixer amplifier powers the ISM5T wall mount speakers in each of the six dressing rooms.
Theatre manager David Atkinson says, "We've got an excellent-sounding professional system that does everything we want it to. So far it has performed impeccably."
(Jim Evans)
