In common with many provincial venues, the Hertford Theatre is council-run and stages a wide variety of events - focusing on drama, comedy, lectures, community events and films. The production centrepiece of the year is the annual pantomime, which runs throughout December and early January, often with two shows a day.
"By the end of last year everything on the sound side was life expired, it had reached a crucial point where we had no choice but to do something," says the theatre's technical manager Alex Antonis. "The pantomime, in particular, places great demands on the audio facilities, but even the amateur companies and semi-pro youth theatres that use the venue were needing more channels.
"We also found that, in order to cut costs, more and more visiting productions are not touring with sound equipment, they are just using house systems. We knew that we could make things a lot easier for them by having a modern setup."
With the theatre's old analogue system ready to be consigned to history, Alex and his small team knew that digital was the way forward. They spoke to LMC Audio's Carl Skeats, who guided them through the available options. Yamaha was an obvious choice and, after attending one of LMC's CL series training seminars, they chose a CL3 mixing console and a pair of R-series i/o units.
"Cost-wise, the system worked out roughly the same as analogue, but you can do a lot more and it delivers excellent sound quality," says Antonis. "Of the three systems we looked at, the CL series definitely had the edge for live mixing. We also heard a lot of good comments about it, about how robust and proven the technology is."
He continues, "It was also very important for us that Yamaha is such an industry standard. We needed something that visiting engineers either know or can learn very quickly. We only have a technical team of three and so don't have a lot of time to babysit people."
LMC supplied the system, which is fully redundant, with Carl Skeats and Yamaha's Karl Christmas following up with an in-house training session. "We now have a system that will last us many years before it needs upgrading and is very straightforward to expand if necessary," says Antonis. "I'm a lighting engineer, but I've found the CL3 very fast to get to grips with. It's a pleasure to use and everyone is loving it. To be honest we can't keep some people off it."
(Jim Evans)
