D80: a sophisticated fairy tale reality
In a small town far, far away in the windy North Western corner of Denmark there resides a company called Allround. As a regional market town Struer is so remote that even with a fast horse a Prince could take as long as six days to ride there from the capital, Copenhagen. Princesses in distress notwithstanding, he would have to stop halfway and talk with a certain Hans Christian Andersen.
Why the fairy tale allegory? Well six years ago Allround's owner Laurs Pedersen made his first small investment in a Q-Series system from d&b audiotechnik. In the intervening years he has grown Allround Sound and Light (to give the company its full name) to become one of the largest PA rental houses in Denmark, and if that doesn't touch the Hans Christian Andersen in you then your heart is made of ice.
Allround took delivery of twenty four D80s just before Christmas, "I was surprised by the size of the order," said Lars Frederiksen of Alfa Audio, the distributor for d&b in Denmark, "even considering Pedersen's reputation for dynamic growth." But there are good reasons why the D80 is more than just the engine under the bonnet. On power performance alone the four channel D80 impresses; it will add +4 dB to the performance of the V-Series. But to focus on gains in power is to overlook the more sophisticated advantages of the D80.
You may not want to look under the bonnet, but any driver worth their salt wants to be sure the performance achieved from the total system is the best possible: that's the d&b System reality. Seamless workflow is a claim often made and frequently lapsed in the breach, but any given audio project, be it installation or event, starts with a venue. From the venue data the project is built in d&b ArrayCalc; the room is modelled, systems selected, then the data exported directly into the d&b R1 Remote control software. With your project safely loaded into R1 it only remains to rig the loudspeakers, plug in the amplifiers, and turn the system on. A seamless workflow that belies the sophistication of it's component parts.
Maybe Lars Frederiksen should not have been so surprised after all. With just twenty four D80s added to their inventory Allround will now be able to power 128 V-TOPs with 64 V-SUBs. So this was not some gesture of daring and bravado by Pedersen, "I had been given a preview of the D80's potential and been taken by the extra power this four channel amplifier can give. That and its flexibility really resonated with me. For a rental company like Allround the D80 is ideal, it can drive every loudspeaker in the d&b product line and brings gains to all of them. But that was not why I made the purchase. For me it's the effect of that extra power; the transients are so much faster. That's subjective I know, but I heard it immediately on the J-Series. Since I've got them here and tried them on some of my Q-Series the same result applies. I've always been really, really happy with the Q-Series, but with the D80 it's even better." A fairy tale ending you might say, but as with everything Pedersen does, this is just the beginning.
