The Outsiders becomes the first Broadway show to use the new L'Acoustics line of speakers

For decades, the production power of a concert tour was measured in the number of trucks it needed to transport its equipment across the country.

But bigger isn't always better, especially in a theater environment where the space in the proscenium arch needs to support loudspeakers that maximize coverage without distracting from the look and feel of the show. For The foreigners musical at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater on Broadway in New York, which means experimenting with L'Acoustics' new, lighter, more compact L Series speakers.

The speaker development is a first for Broadway and part of Sound Designer Cody Spencer”use of L'Acoustics L-ISA sound technology for The foreigners. The new show is nominated for 12 Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Sound Design of a Musical.

Announced last year at L'Acoustics' keynote event at the Hollywood Bowl, the L Series loudspeakers are being deployed in a number of new activations in the touring world, including their recent installation on First Avenue in Minneapolis. L Series speakers use up to 60% less material to build, compared to speakers with similar power and sound coverage, and 30% less space. Unlike traditional line array configurations that must be hung in a J-shaped angle, the L Series can be installed in a fixed configuration, requiring less physical space to deploy while allowing the crew to make sound adjustments without mechanics.

The speakers are the latest line array speaker system first developed by the founder of L'Acoustics Christian Heil 40 years ago. Thanks to Heil's work on Wavefront Sculpture Technology (WST), line array technology has improved sound reinforcement for live performances and has become the standard for sound coverage and clarity in large venues and festival venues, allowing fans in the back to hear vocals and higher frequencies without sound distortion.

The new L Series speaker, starting with the L2, a 10-inch long-throw progressive speaker with an ultra line progressive source “is the ultimate achievement of 30 years of technological improvements in the line series,” said L'Acoustics CEO Laurent Vaissié he said in a statement.

“When Christian started thinking about this in the late '80s and early '90s, the idea was to create a fully coherent speaker configuration that could have uniform coverage from front to back,” said Vaissié. “With the L Series, we're able to eliminate more of the material and physical boundaries between the different parts of the speaker and line array to make it even more compact.”

“We did this,” Vaissié explained, “by naturally removing the articulation between the line segments and creating the very specific shape of L2.”

This figure was the result of analyzing “thousands of different shows where we looked at audience formation,” Vaissié continued. “We realized that if we start with this shape already, we're almost there in terms of coverage. We realized that we could eliminate the articulation of the line array and fine-tune the coverage with electronics and software. And that's why I say it's the ultimate development because 10 years ago, we couldn't have done the L2 because the electronics and the software weren't yet at the level they needed to be. But today we finally got to the point where mechanical design, software, and electronics converged so that we could have an optimized design for L2, eliminate all the physical hardware we didn't need, make it smaller, and then fit software and electronics for perfect coverage in the vertical sector.”

Spencer said the L2 speakers helped The foreigners fixing an issue created by the production's use of a rain curtain, which pushed the show's speakers to the front of the house.

“I plugged them into our Soundvision model,” Spencer said in a press release, adding that he found the L-Series speaker “gave us three more rows of coverage in front of the orchestra over traditional line array speakers.”

The L Series speakers are currently on tour with Italian hip-hop duo Coez & Frah Quintale and will be used on Sarah McLachlan's 2024 tour.

“We are sold out of L2 right now until the first quarter of next year. We could have more, but we try to balance between the needs for the rental companies and the needs for the installation project,” says Vaissié. “The market is responding very well and the demand is much higher than we expected.”