Over the past three years Clair Bros. TrueFit Technology, the first modular and fully customizable, bespoke waveguide system available for venues, according to the company, has evolved. Its genesis began as an idea to optimize frequency dispersion by customizing the horizontal waveguide to enhance directivity throughout an entire unique space. TrueFit Technology, with its trademark customized sound tailoring using Clair Brothers KitCurve, C8 and C12 line arrays, is a true industry breakthrough and continues to be applied with tremendous success.
The inner woodworking of a fully custom array involves intricate crafting challenges and the design process can be responsible for pushing up the system price and realistically, not every venue has the budget to install a 100% custom-tailored TrueFit system. Recognizing this compelled Clair Bros. to consider a "ready-fit" product option specifically for small- to mid-sized venues that have certain overall geometric similarities: spaces where a KitCurve-TrueFit system would be the ideal choice, but where a budget-focused project stipulates a cost-saving alternative.
After successfully deploying KitCurve-TrueFit systems in several custom projects, the engineering team identified a pattern of room-dimension commonalities. For myriad similarly-sized 200- to 500-seat venues, two prevalent room shapes include: one that is relatively shallow front-to-back, yet wide side-to-side, and another that is rather deep, but narrow.
Josh Sadd, chief design engineer at Clair Bros., explains it this way: “If you think of these two room geometries in terms of photography formats, a strong comparison would be ‘landscape’ and ‘portrait’, where shallow and wide is ‘landscape’ and narrow and deep is ‘portrait.’ It’s all about capturing the horizontal plane angles within the dimensions of a given room.”
Clair Bros. is now offering the KitCurve-TrueFit Landscape and KitCurve-TrueFit Portrait models. These standardized TrueFit line array systems are an intermediate choice between the standard, 90-degree horizontal product and the fully customized TrueFit system. The KitCurve-TrueFit Landscape | Portrait visionary array products are solid options for venues on a watchful budget.
When it comes to sound, the biggest advantage of TrueFit technology is how it expands imaging across the entire audience, so a person sitting near the front right of a theater can hear the left side of the PA, and vice versa. Sadd concludes, “For the price of a close-to-customized TrueFit system, a venue will be much nearer to having a custom-tailored sound than if they spend their budget on a standard curve system. Money is saved on engineering time."
