MONA L-ISA

L-ISA only debuted in 2016, and Guillame Le Nost, L-Acoustics’ Director of R&D on L-ISA, is already referring to stereo PA deployments as “the way it used to be”, “traditional”, and “stuck in a 50-year old configuration.” I guess everything looks nostalgic when you’ve poured the last few years of your life into developing the ‘next step’ in live sound technology.

As Le Nost tells it, it all started when L-Acoustics’ founder Christian Heil had his lightbulb moment five years ago. Heil was sitting up in the side bleachers at a concert and hearing the vocals out of a PA hang situated 10m to the left of where the singer was physically standing. His frustration with this lack of continuity between sight and sound was only compounded by looking at the multi-storey-high video screens and lighting extravaganzas pushing the PA further out of the picture. It seemed like an imbalance. “After all, everything is a consequence of the music,” reminded Le Nost. “It’s firstly about music, not seeing a singer on a big screen.”

Heil reckoned they could do better. “Inevitably, we’re going to have to adopt different sound designs anyway,” concurred Le Nost, who could foresee those video screens eventually pushing PAs further out of the picture. “We thought we had great products, but in terms of deployment and configuration, we could do something better to address the questions of localisation