Following a three-day July vernissage cruise from Venice, the Costa Favolosa (114,500 gross tonnage and 3,800 total guests) began offering Eastern Mediterranean cruises, before being positioned in Dubai for eight-day Arabian Nights cruises in the UAE and Oman for the winter 2011/2012 season.
With its 13 passenger decks, the Favolosa, built entirely in Italy by Fincantieri, is the largest ship flying the Italian flag and offers guests a wide range of leisure and entertainment amenities, the latter including the three-deck Hortensia theatre, featuring a concentrate of cutting edge AV technology and several interesting firsts.
Whilst Nautilus specified the system, with the exception of a few owner-supplied products, the majority of the actual installation work was done by specialist marine system integration firm HMS (Harbour Marine Systems).
Paolo Campanelli, consultant and executive technical-artistic specialist with Costa's Cruise Operations Department, Entertainment, had the job of making certain the technical resources installed ensured all on-board entertainment and related events were as spectacular as possible.
"As far as theatre audio is concerned, the important new feature is the DiGiCo console," states Campanelli. "Following the D5s installed on the Costa Luminosa, Deliziosa and Pacifica, we chose an SD7T for the Favolosa."
The DiGiCo desk used for the highly automated main production shows Vibration and Enchanted Castle, plus various other events staged in the theatre, is manned by sound engineer Danilo Amato, also responsible for ensuring passengers top grade sound in the other 25 onboard locations with performing artists.
Amato, who has worked with DiGiCo consoles for years (particularly the D5), explains, "Compared with land shows, as well as the advantage of the system being permanently installed, another big pro of working on the Favolosa is in the automation and the console's use of time code, which greatly facilitates work for sound engineers. The cast changes periodically, but the shows runs for a year, and everything must always be exactly the same. These facilities allow new engineers coming on board to operate the console without being familiar with the show."
(Jim Evans)
