d&b audiotechnik Celebrates Award Success at PLASA London 2015

	Gianni Abruzzese, d&b audiotechnik, receives the PLASA Award for Innovation from Ed Pagett, PLASA EU board chairman

At the PLASA exhibition in London this week, the d&b audiotechnik GB team and sales partner SSE/Wigwam took the opportunity to talk to visitors and answer questions about the recently launched V-Series point sources. And the company says there was plenty to talk about following the announcement that the new V7P and V10P had been named in the 2015 PLASA Awards for Innovation.

"The new point sources attracted a lot of attention at the stand," said Gianni Abruzzese, d&b GB commercial manager. "They're actually a really good example of the way d&b products are designed to work systematically. The three-way passive V7P and V10P provide exceptional directivity control with a high output. We had a V7P cabinet with the sides cut out on the d&b stand, exposing the hornloaded mid range section. It's this dual chamber horn, which provides a remarkable MF performance, especially in the vocal range, that really sets this point source loudspeaker out from the crowd."

"Receiving a PLASA Award for Innovation for this new system is a great endorsement from the industry. We expected people to be excited by the series heritage of the point sources, so to be recognized for their originality as well is fantastic."

There was further cause to celebrate following the Technical Theatre Awards, and news that David Gregory had won The "d&b audiotechnik Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sound." This was the second year d&b officially sponsored the accolade, which is given to highlight a specific individual for their commitment to sound. Gregory is a sound designer and production engineer for theatre and live arts.

As part of the PLASA show's Professional Development Program, d&b GB's Steve Jones took attendees through some typical sound reinforcement challenges. His seminar titled "Delighted audience. Happy neighbors" focussed on ways of reducing noise offsite, while maintaining effective levels for listening areas. Adam Hockley, also of the d&b education and application support team presented a session named "Line arrays unravelled," which explored the directivity control of line arrays. Attendees were introduced to d&b ArrayProcessing, which enhances the performance of the d&b J-, V-, and Y-Series line array systems. This new software tool is part of the d&b ArrayCalc simulation software, available to download from dbaudio.com.

The V-Series point sources build on the three-way passive design of the V-Series line array modules. The V7P and V10P both house two 10" drivers in a dipolar arrangement with a rear mounted 8" MF driver attached to a dual chamber horn. The exits from this horn design create another dipole around the centrally mounted single 1.4" exit compression driver with a constant directivity horn. This maximizes the performance to size ratio, by making almost the entire baffle board radiate.

V7P / V10P deliver 75-degree x 40-degree and 110-degree x 40-degree (h x v) dispersion characteristics respectively. All components are arranged symmetrically around the centre axis of the cabinet to produce a perfectly symmetrical dispersion pattern. Due to the dipolar arrangement of the LF drivers, broadband dispersion control is maintained down to approximately 350Hz in the same plane as the dipole. The rotatable horn and wide range of rigging options make mounting in either orientation simple.