Staged in the Palais des Sports de Grenoble, the focus of the Festival was on two round circus stages, each 12m wide, in a 2,000sq.m hall. More than 16,000 spectators attended the event. IZO provided Yamaha PM5D digital consoles mixing Nexo's GEO S tangent-array systems, powered by Camco Vortex 6 amplifiers, with AuviTran's EtherSound conversion and compatibility management devices ensuring full network capability over optical fibre.
Using an EtherSound network provided some notable advances over traditional ways of working. Just 5kg of optical fibre was required, compared with an estimated 200kg of multicore for a conventional PA. The system also offered significantly improved signal quality, with just one A/D conversion on the preamps and 1 D/A conversion on the Nexo NX242TDcontroller processors. This compares with a conventional approach which might use up to eight such conversions, each degrading signal quality and increasing audio latency.
The network gives the front-of-house engineer complete remote control over all his loudspeaker processors (five Nexo NX242 TDControllers complete with ES4-NXtension cards), as well as microphones, head amps and all other network devices (such as AuviTran's AVB32 or AVRed Status).
The EtherSound routing system offered full redundancy. The network was split in two by AuviTran's AVRed-ES redundant links management devices, sending the signal from the Yamaha PM5D front-of-house console, equipped with three of AuviTran's AVY-16ES cards, and the other to an identical PM5D monitor console at the side of the stage.
At the monitor console (which a Yamaha AD8HR with AuviTran's AVKit-ES modification kit made EtherSound-compatible), the routing path reached the stageboxes where an AVB32-ES AES/EBU to EtherSound device received 24 microphone inputs from three other AD8HRs. The path continued to the backstage switch, where the signal was split for different Camco Vortex amplifier clusters, each powering Nexo GEO S arrays of 15 S805 plus one S830, and five CD12 plus a single CD18 sub, Nexo Alpha cabinets for the far sides of the auditorium, and Nexo PS15 full-range cabinets for the middle of the circus rings. The Alpha and PS 15s were plugged into the system via NetCIRA's Analogue Devices, further demonstrating the flexibility of the system.
(Lee Baldock)
