Lab.gruppen D Series delivers Dante to Hamilton Place Theatre

Owing to changes in the entertainment industry, the 2,200-seat Hamilton Place Theatre’s audio system has been upgraded substantially, and now boasts a rig driven exclusively by Lab.gruppen amplifiers.

On any given night the Canadian venue hosts shows ranging from dance performances through to one-man standup acts like Billy Connolly.

“The previous system was installed roughly 15 years ago,” said Mike Stewart, head of audio at Hamilton Place. “More bands tour without full production now, and while the old system provided decent coverage, we needed something that would provide more output, tighter sound, and make the venue more flexible and competitive.”

The original design called for Kling & Freitag (K&F) loudspeakers and Lab.gruppen amps, but it wasn’t until Lab.gruppen’s D Series amps were released that Stewart and Calvin Roy, vice president of product sales/integration at Soundbox Pro realised how good a fit D Series was for the venue’s needs. “We worked closely with K&F and Lab.gruppen to develop the design,” Roy revealed, “and chose the new D Series amps because they integrated Dante Audio Networking.”

Dante has enabled the venue to reuse existing cabling infrastructure, keeping the project cost effective and speeding up install time.

In total four D Series D 80s drive the under balcony speakers, L/R house fills and front fills, while eight D 200s power the line array and subs. Additionally, three PLM 12K44 amps drive the monitor system.

While the new loudspeaker system is significantly larger than its predecessor and allows Hamilton Place to better serve diverse touring acts, D Series’ power, and the integration of Dante and Lake Processing, has allowed the venue to cut the number of amps needed to run the rig by around half.

“A lot of companies have four-channel amps, but the Labs being 4-in and 4-out gave us more control,” Roy continued, “which allowed us to build the whole network seamlessly and, with the Dante audio networking backbone, send basically unlimited amount of audio signal anywhere we wanted. So, if a touring act does want to hang their own system and tap into the under balconies, main hang, and/or subs, we can. Lab.gruppen is the only company to offer that.”

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