The Oregon Symphony starts its annual concert season in style at the end of each summer, celebrating popular classics in the heart of the community with outdoor performances staged in Portland‘s public parks.
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Local company Horne Audio deployed Electro-Voice XLC loudspeaker systems for August 30th performances by the Portland Youth Philharmonic and the Oregon Symphony in Tom McCall Waterfront Park, which featured a program of classical favorites ranging from Copland to Tchaikovsky. Horne addressed the large bowl-shaped venue with 14 delay towers in 15 time zones, a surround sound system with a circumference of approximately 1000-feet.

Spaced up to 75-feet apart, the towers were configured to keep every member of the audience in a near-field zone, minimizing environmental effects on sound quality. Most of the towers featured three XLC127DVX enclosures, with low-end support via two XLC215 subwoofers. In addition, QRx112/75 boxes provided front fills and delays at far the end of the venue. All Horne‘s XLC boxes are loaded with EV‘s new DVX woofers, offering more low-frequency muscle, more mid-range headroom and higher overall power handling. A total of 36 XLC127DVX and 20 XLC215 were used for the concert.

“This community event is always a pleasant way to cap off our summer work schedule,” says Peter Horne. “We‘ve done this show for a number of years now, and used to use trap boxes; for past three years we‘ve used XLC line arrays, which provide more precise coverage and full bandwidth control. The effect is seamless, and the XLC‘s characteristic mid-range warmth and smoothness really impressed the organizers, especially with the added boost of the DVX drivers.” Aside from working well against the ambient noise of the city surroundings, Horne‘s XLC system has to reproduce a lot of musical information in this somewhat unusual configuration. It does both beautifully: “The overall impression is that the full orchestral sound is everywhere, even and clear,” Horne adds.

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