The new Festival d’Aix-en-Provence production of The Threepenny Opera (Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, 1928), starring Le Balcon orchestra alongside the troupe of the Comédie-Française and directed by Thomas Ostermeier, unfolds as a true scientific opera, merging sound spatialization with active acoustics.
The electro-acoustic setup comprises nearly 60 speakers, positioned to face, surround, envelop, and at times hover above the audience. Together, they recreate virtual acoustic reflections with the utmost naturalness, while supporting both singers and musicians with exceptional precision.
The main front-of-house system is built around three loudspeaker “antennas,” or arrays, composed of Amadeu s loudspeakers.
The first ‘antenna’ is made of eight Amadeus C 12 R coaxial speakers, flown above the front of the stage. These loudspeakers are evenly spaced across 15-meters with identical spacing between each speaker in the array.
The second ‘antenna’ is made of 14-point source transducers built into the front of the stage. These 14 loudspeakers, variants of the Amadeus PMX 5 model, form a large-scale ‘sound ramp’. They are evenly distributed across 14-meters, with 1-meter between each adjacent speaker. This speaker setup has been specifically designed for the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence.
Each ‘module’ is based on 2-point source speakers, inherited from the Amadeus PMX 5 reference, for a total of 14 transducers. The front panel is angled at 13° matching the bleacher’s curvature of the audience seating, allowing an acoustical center of each speaker aiming the last row of seats.
Fixed in front of the proscenium, this large-scale front-fill system with limited depth offers three main functions. It naturally allows for perfect sound coverage of the lower half of the audience. It allows the sound image to be lowered, to bring back sound coming from the stage, and thus to maximize the accuracy between sound and visual images. Finally, this high-density of loudspeakers offers very high spatial resolution, making their location almost imperceptible to the audience, as well as the presence of other sound reinforcement.
says Numa Galipot, Junior Acoustic Engineer at Amadeus.
This front-fill system can be disassembled in a few minutes.
The third line of loudspeakers is made of twelve Amadeus PMX 4 coaxial speakers, flown under the balcony. It covers the last third of the bleachers.
The entire system is powered by a HOLOPHONIX spatial sound processor, offering high accuracy of sound localization for the audience in the theater environment.
Images 1- 4: Photo credit © Jean Louis Fernandez
