NEXO Alpha+

Captivate Solutions

Back in the mid-'90s, NEXO — the French outfit that's been building loudspeakers since 1979 — put out the original Alpha Series, and it quietly became one of those systems that just refused to die. The idea was simple and a bit ahead of its time: take genuine big-rig power and directivity and pack it into compact, same-size cabinets you could stack or fly in whatever combination the gig called for. It turned up everywhere, from sweaty little clubs to enormous festival clusters, and thirty years on plenty of those original rigs are still out there working, still sounding the part. When a system earns that kind of loyalty, you don't throw the name away — you build on it.

That's the Alpha+. Same attitude — modular, powerful, clean — rebuilt around modern pattern control and modern amps.

Why it exists

Line arrays fixed a lot of problems and created a couple of new ones. To fly one properly you need hang points, roof loading and motors, or a pile of ground-support towers when the building won't cooperate — and a huge number of venues just can't or won't play along. Old theatres don't have the rigging points or the roof loading to hang a long array over the stalls and the balcony. Clubs and installs rarely justify the faff. And on a mid-size festival stage you can burn real money building towers just to get boxes in the air.

The Alpha+ sidesteps all of it. It's a long-throw, point-source system that behaves like an array where it counts — NEXO calls the approach Hybrid Source. You get the coupling and directivity control you'd want from a line array, but you deploy it as easily as stacking a couple of point-source boxes. It goes where a line array won't.

The three boxes

The whole system is three modules, and that's on purpose. The M210 is the main — a horn-loaded dual 10" sat coaxially with four 3" HF compression drivers, hitting a 148 dB peak and still cutting through clearly from 30 metres back. Its clever bit is directivity control without rigging angles: the horizontal pattern drifts from 60° up top to 120° at the bottom and can be reshaped to 90°/120° or 60°/60° with magnetic flanges, while an "unlockable" waveguide block flips the vertical coverage between narrow (0°/-20°) and wide/standard (+20°/-20°). So you shape the coverage at the box instead of curving a hang.

Under that sits the B218, a horn-loaded dual 18" bass module — you run these one-for-one with the mains, so a B218 per M210 is your basic building block. And when you want proper weight underneath everything, the L20 sub-bass — a band-pass single 20" borrowed from NEXO's P+ Series — is where the bottom octave lives.

That's it. Three boxes that stack fast and scale clean.

One system, loads of rooms

Because every module shares the same stacking DNA, the same three boxes turn up to completely different jobs. Ground-stack it on a mid-size festival stage and you skip the towers and the flying altogether. Install it in a club and you've got point-source simplicity with a stupid amount of headroom. Drop it into a heritage theatre with nothing to hang off and it just works — which is exactly where most big systems fall over. Even for corporate and conference work, the pattern control keeps speech clean in rooms that'd normally fight you.

Scaling is just a matter of adding boxes. Baseline is one M210, one B218 and a pair of L20 a side; step up to two-and-two with four subs for a bigger room; and for the big stuff you're into proper multi-box clusters across trusses. Stack up complete Alpha+ rigs and you keep climbing in SPL while holding onto the pattern control — that's your route to seriously loud without ever swapping systems.

Roll it in, plug it in, go

Here's the part that makes it a genuine pleasure on a load-in: the stack builds straight onto a NEXO dolly. You wheel the whole thing in on its castors — cover on if you like — line it up, plug in the amp, and you're basically ready to make noise. No towers to build, no motors to rig, nothing to certify overhead. For install crews and event ops alike, that turns what used to be a half-day rig into wheeling a couple of stacks into position and hitting go.

Powering it — and the low-end trick

The Alpha+ runs on NEXO's NXAMP4X4Mk2 — 4 × 4,500 W at 2 Ω plus all the processing and protection, in just 3U of rack. A basic stack a side wants one of them, split two channels to the M210 main, one to the B218 bass, and one to both L20 subs.

That last bit is the lever worth knowing about. In the baseline, two subs share a single amp channel. When a room's begging for more bottom — a bass-heavy dance night, a bigger field — you just throw more amp at the subs: give each L20 its own channel instead of pairing them, and every sub gets its own headroom and output. Same boxes, more grunt, and the low end stays clean when you lean on it hard.

And you can design the whole thing before it leaves the shed — NEXO's free NS-1 software models your SPL coverage for any Alpha+ layout in any room, so you walk into a tender or a pre-pro with a plan you can actually defend instead of a hunch.

In stock. Ready to deliver now.

Here's the important part: Captivate Solutions has Alpha+ on the floor right now, ready to deliver — unless it's rattled its own way out the door to some lucky customer before you call. No months-long factory lead time, no waiting on a container to land. If you've got a room that needs the power and the pattern control but can't take a flown array — or you just want the '90s legend reborn, wheeled in on its dolly and ready to go — we can get it to you now.

And if you'd rather hear it before you commit, reach out and we'll line up a demo. There's no substitute for standing in front of it.

Captivate Solutions — professional AV brands, specified and supported properly.