Jikei Gakuen Graduation Ceremony upgrades Sound with L-Acoustics

Jikei Gakuen’s annual joint graduation ceremony in the Tokyo area has adopted a new L-Acoustics sound system to deliver both speech and live music in a challenging ballroom environment. For the 2026 edition at the Sheraton Grande Tokyo Bay Hotel in Maihama, audio company Sonic Wave partnered with L-Acoustics Certified Provider Bestec Audio to deploy a compact, full-bandwidth system built around K3 and Kiva II loudspeakers.

Graduation Ceremony pairs Spoken Word and Live Music

Table of Contents

The Jikei Gakuen group brings together its schools across the Tokyo area each spring for a joint graduation ceremony. In 2026, nine schools gathered approximately 1,400 students, families and staff for a one-day event at The Club Fuji, the Sheraton Grande Tokyo Bay’s grand ballroom in Chiba Prefecture.

The programme combined formal elements such as speeches and the reading of every graduate’s name with live music from the schools’ own teaching staff, including keyboardist Mickie Yoshino. This dual role placed equal emphasis on speech intelligibility and musical impact for the audio system.

The Club Fuji spans more than 1,600 square metres, measuring 32.0 metres deep by 50.5 metres wide with a 6.2-metre ceiling. Its width, significantly greater than its depth, poses a coverage challenge for conventional left-right hangs placed at the front of the room, which can leave the centre without consistent sound.

Main System deployment uses K3 and KS21

Sonic Wave, which has handled sound for the ceremony for several years, selected L-Acoustics K3 as the core of a new main system for 2026. The company specified four K3 per side, supported by three KS21 subwoofers per side configured in cardioid mode. The cardioid arrangement focused low-frequency energy toward the audience and reduced spill toward surfaces behind the hangs.

K3’s ability to provide full bandwidth from a compact enclosure allowed a single main hang on each side to serve both the spoken-word and music portions of the programme. This marked the first time Sonic Wave used K3 and KS21 as the primary system for the event, after having relied on Kiva II previously for in-fill.

Sonic Wave Director Kohei Harashima, who also teaches sound part-time at the Kasai campus of the Tokyo School of Music & Dance College, notes that the voice remains central in this type of ceremony, from the MC through to each speaker on stage. For the 2026 graduation, K3 was tasked with raising the clarity and quality of that vocal reproduction while also handling the dynamic demands of the live band.

In-Fill coverage relies on Lightweight Kiva II

Providing seamless sound coverage across the very wide ballroom required additional in-fill in the centre of the room. However, The Club Fuji offered no floor space to stack loudspeakers, and its ceiling battens imposed a strict weight limit on any flown arrays.

Under these constraints, Sonic Wave turned again to L-Acoustics Kiva II. The lightweight line source fit within the rigging capacity of the ballroom while covering the central audience area where sound from the main left-right hangs would naturally diminish.

The final system design used four arrays of four Kiva II as in-fill, flown from the venue’s overhead battens. Sonic Wave had already accumulated several years of experience with Kiva II and other L-Acoustics systems, including as in-fill for earlier editions of the same graduation ceremony. The compact format aligns with the company’s operational model of working with a small, experienced crew and transporting systems in a van. For other productions, Sonic Wave typically selects subwoofers from the SB15m or SB18 ranges depending on room size.

System design uses Soundvision and one-Day Load In

With all in-fill positions suspended and only a single day available to prepare the ballroom, Sonic Wave relied on L-Acoustics Soundvision modelling software to optimise the system before arriving on site. The team simulated loudspeaker placement and coverage in advance, arriving with loudspeaker settings already prepared.

The complete deployment at The Club Fuji consisted of:

Four L-Acoustics K3 per side as the main system
Three KS21 subwoofers per side in cardioid configuration for low-frequency control
Four arrays of four Kiva II as flown in-fill covering the centre of the room
12XT coaxial enclosures providing out-fill and stage monitoring for the live performances

This configuration aimed to deliver even coverage and tonal consistency from front to back and across the full 50.5-metre width of the ballroom, while meeting strict rigging and scheduling constraints.

System performance sets new Benchmark for Future Ceremony

The joint graduation ceremony returns to The Club Fuji each year, with each edition becoming a practical benchmark for the next. For 2026, Harashima reports that using K3 improved vocal quality compared with previous systems, while the combination with Kiva II helped achieve even coverage across the entire audience area.

The teaching staff’s live performances benefited from the same full-bandwidth system, reinforcing the decision to standardise on a main L-Acoustics array supplemented by carefully placed in-fill and out-fill. According to Harashima, L-Acoustics loudspeakers offer strong potential for future events, and he is keen to adopt new technologies from the manufacturer as they become available, including features such as L-Acoustics Source Intelligence.

For the Jikei Gakuen group, Sonic Wave and Bestec Audio, the 2026 graduation at the Sheraton Grande Tokyo Bay demonstrates how a carefully modelled, compact L-Acoustics deployment can address the acoustic challenges of a large, low-ceilinged ballroom while meeting the dual demands of ceremony speech and live music performance.