Courtesy of Sharon Paquette Lose via Front Of House Online
Firehouse Productions’ 96 new L-Acoustics K2 enclosures stacked four-high on K2-Chariots
RED HOOK, NY – Firehouse Productions recently added 96 new L-Acoustics K2 enclosures to its inventory along with 36 LA8 amplified controllers housed in a dozen LA-RAK touring racks. Shared between Firehouse’s Red Hook, NY headquarters and the company’s five-year-old Las Vegas location, the K2 loudspeakers are already scheduled to be part of the L-Acoustics systems that will accompany Radiohead at Madison Square Garden. They’ll also support tours this year for Florence + The Machine and the “Rock, Paper, Scissors” double-bill of Peter Gabriel and Sting.
Having toured with many of music’s most innovative, genre-defying artists—Peter Gabriel, Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and The Cure, just to name a few—TEC and Emmy Award-winning sound reinforcement provider Firehouse Productions is widely celebrated for its ability to help artists translate the complex creativity and sonic fidelity of their recordings to the live stage.
For many years, Firehouse has chosen to deploy L-Acoustics loudspeaker systems, especially K1 in recent years. Now, the company has deepened its commitment to the manufacturer with its recent February purchase of 96 K2 enclosures in addition to 36 LA8 amplified controllers housed in a dozen LA-RAK touring racks.
According to Firehouse Productions Director of Touring Chris Russo, the K2 acquisition will enable even more flexible system designs. “The K2 can certainly be configured into their own system designs, and they’re great-sounding speakers on their own, but they also add lots of new possibilities when used with our other L-Acoustics speakers,” he says. “Sonically, they’re a perfect match with the K1 speakers we already use”—that’s because the K2 is modeled on the K1 system design and rescaled into a 12-inch, compact and flexible format—“and a lot lighter, plus have total rigging compatibility with K1 and K1-SB.
“They’re also the perfect bridge between the K1 and Kara speakers we deploy. For situations where K1 is too large, K2 becomes the main speaker with Kara as fills, which is a very rigging-point-friendly solution for mid-sized venues. And for designs that K1 is perfect for, K2 acts as the right-sized support speaker delivering incredible uniformity with its bigger brother. In both situations, K2’s Wavefront Sculpture (WST) and Panflex technologies allow us to precisely control both the vertical and horizontal directivity for maximum performance and coverage with minimum noise pollution.”
The new inventory at the Las Vegas office will also help support Firehouse Productions’ corporate and entertainment clients on the West Coast. Recent projects serviced there with L-Acoustics systems have included corporate events for Apple, Google, Melaleuca and VMware, with K1 also being deployed on December’s 2015 Jingle Ball Tour featuring Demi Lovato, The Weeknd and Fall Out Boy, among other artists.
“With K2 in both our Las Vegas and New York inventories, we now have truly national coverage with L-Acoustics, and that’s going to help us and our clients tremendously from a logistics point of view,” says Russo. “Great coverage and great sound!”