Historic Granada Theatre equipped with Powersoft K Series amplifiers

A new cinema audio set-up featuring Powersoft K Series amplifiers has been installed at the Granada Theatre in Santa Barbara, California.

The amps are fitted with KDSP digital signal processing and KAESOP networking cards to drive the new 5.1 system’s LCR plus LFE channel loudspeakers.

"We added EAW QX596i three-way, bi-amped boxes for left, center and right, and two EAW SB2001 subwoofers," said Mike Shelton, senior systems engineer at integrator AMT Systems, a full-service AV engineering and installation contractor based in Santa Clarita, California.

The left- and right-channel speakers were flown to either side of the new Stewart screen, while the centre-channel speaker and dual subwoofers were suspended immediately above the screen.

Two Powersoft K2 DSP+AESOP amplifiers power the passive coaxial high- and mid-frequency compression drivers in the three QX596i cabinets; three K3 DSP+AESOP amps drive the four 12-inch low frequency speakers in each of the three boxes and a further two K10 DSP+AESOP units power the twin SB2001 dual-21-inch subwoofers, which carry the low frequency effects (LFE) channel.

"A Dolby Labs CP750 digital cinema processor is taking all the audio from the Doremi Labs ShowVault video server and decoding it out to the 5.1 channels," continued Shelton. The LCR and LFE channels are distributed to the Powersoft amplifiers, while the left and right surround channels are sent to the theatre’s existing Meyer Sound Constellation system.

"The high slew rate and tremendous power capacity gave the speaker system remarkable impact and effortless dynamic range. What was also really nice about using the Powersoft amplifiers was that we used all of the DSP in the amplifiers to tune the speakers, set the crossovers and get the room flat. That made it really simple to do the X Curve processing in the Dolby processor."

"When we delivered the amps I built a preset group that included all the EAW GrayBox settings for every possible combination of speaker loads and installed them into each of the amps," stated Paul Hugo of Marshank Sales Co., Powersoft’s regional representative. "When Mike installed the amps he just went to the menu of presets and selected the appropriate one for each individual channel. And since every channel has every preset there is redundancy built in should there ever be a failure – which of course will never happen!"

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