When School of the Arts (SOTA), Singapore decided to overhaul the sound system in its Concert Hall, the wish list was ambitious: consistent intelligibility across 628 seats, from classical recitals to multimedia productions, without disrupting the halls carefully tuned acoustic character. What the brief didn’t fully capture was the complexity hiding in the room itself: highly reflective surfaces, serious rigging constraints, and a subwoofer geometry problem that would only reveal itself during installation.
L-Acoustics Certified Partner Concept Systems navigated every one of those obstacles, completing the full installation in a two-week window with performances booked immediately after.
SOTA’s Concert Hall was originally designed with acoustic performance at its heart. That’s a feature for the musicians who perform there. But for sound engineers, getting intelligibility right in that environment demanded exceptional control over directivity.
James Pithouse, senior engineer (product and project) at Concept Systems, said: “The venue needed highly controlled coverage so that sound energy stayed focused on the audience and avoided exciting reflective surfaces unnecessarily. The A10i with Panflex was the right fit precisely because of how finely we can tune its horizontal dispersion. We can shape the coverage to match audience geometry and cut spill to the walls before it becomes a problem.”
The reflective surfaces were the first challenge, but the second challenge was structural. The Concert Hall’s rigging points carry a strict 200kg maximum load for suspended loudspeaker clusters, ruling out heavier configurations and demanding a system that could deliver full-room coverage at compact scale. The A series, engineered for high output-to-weight ratio, was dimensioned precisely to meet that constraint without trading away SPL or coverage consistency.
The final main system configuration of six A10i Focus and four A10i Wide deployed as left and right hangs fits within the weight limit while covering the full audience area. Five X6i provide front-fill, maintaining tonal consistency for listeners close to the stage.
A third challenge emerged during installation itself. The original design called for a vertical cardioid KS21i subwoofer arrangement but the available ceiling height at the venue made a vertical stack impractical.
Rather than accepting a compromise in bass performance, Concept Systems adapted the design, moving to a horizontal KS21i deployment that maintained cardioid directional control within the physical constraints of the space.
Pithouse explained: “Soundvision was essential in anticipating the room’s behaviour before we arrived. That let us optimise speaker aiming and Panflex settings in advance, so we understood the reflection problems before final tuning. And when the subwoofer geometry needed to change, we had the simulation tools and the system flexibility to adapt quickly.”
L-Acoustics Soundvision drove the design process from the start, allowing Concept Systems to model loudspeaker placement, coverage patterns and SPL distribution across the full audience area before a single piece of kit was hung.
The network infrastructure that supports the installed system runs on a fully redundant Milan-AVB architecture, with three LA4X amplified controllers handling amplification and an L-Acoustics P1 processor managing signal distribution. The P1 receives AES signals from the venue’s existing Yamaha I/O system and routes audio across the network, a clean integration that required no additional format conversion hardware.
Concept Systems completed the full scope, including de-rigging the previous system, installing and commissioning the new configuration, network setup and final optimisation within a two-week window tightly coordinated with the venue’s performance schedule.
Initial feedback from the technical team has confirmed the results the design aimed for: improved clarity, more consistent coverage across all audience positions, and meaningfully greater flexibility when moving between acoustic and amplified programming. Training sessions brought the venue’s operators fully up to speed on day-to-day system management and ongoing optimisation.
Pithouse concluded: “The initial response has been very positive. The venue now has a system that genuinely handles what they put in front of it — and it’s built to grow with them.”