L-Acoustics K2 touring line array — SPL & coverage

The K2 is rated at 147 dB SPL at 1 m, but that figure only ever applies at the cabinet. SPL falls off with distance under the inverse-square relationship: at 20 m and full output, the planner shows approximately 121 dB reaching the listener. Pull the drive level back to 70% — a realistic touring operating point that preserves headroom for programme peaks — and the same 20 m listener sees approximately 119 dB. Quote both figures when a client asks what the box is actually delivering at their seats, not at the stack.

The 110 deg x 10 deg dispersion is the other half of the story. The wide 110 deg horizontal pattern is what produces the approximately 28.6 m horizontal coverage radius the planner calculates for this preset — enough to blanket a 40 m room width from a single central hang or a modest left/right split. The narrow 10 deg vertical pattern is deliberate: it keeps the wavefront off the ceiling and side walls, reducing reflections that would otherwise smear intelligibility across a room this size. The K2 is a passive cabinet, so none of this happens without matched external amplification sized to its 1200 W RMS / 4800 W peak handling.

Use the planner by dragging the listener distance and drive level sliders and watching SPL move in response — that is the feasibility check for whether the design has headroom to spare or is already at its limit. Box count, separately, is a front-coverage estimate based on room area and the cabinet's stated dispersion; treat it as a starting point for how many elements populate the hang, not as confirmation that SPL is adequate at every seat. The two outputs answer different questions and both need checking.

The planner does not model room reverberation or RT60, so a hard-surfaced 40 x 25 m hall will read louder in practice than the free-field SPL figure shown here. It does not divide the room into coverage zones, does not size or place subwoofers, does not account for the mechanical rigging and array curvature that a real K2 hang requires, and does not perform the DSP delay and EQ tuning that turns a calculated coverage pattern into a measured one. Treat every output here as a starting estimate for a design that a system engineer still has to finish.