Worringham says the Shepperton company were particularly helpful in suggesting how the budget could be maximised. "In the end we were able to cover every area I wanted to."He was delighted to have kept continuity with Martin Audio. "Before this system was installed we had a Martin Audio Wavefront system on loan - and it was the best sound we’d ever had," he said. "We wanted something that was sufficiently flexible to cope with the multifunctional use of the venue, such as dance, folk, rock and speech intelligibility. Marquee’s Scott Wakelin recommended that Blackline would strike the right balance of budget and performance - and so it has."
As the Merlin is a fixed format theatre the speakers are configured as a left/right stack, with the remaining two F12’s flown and angled as a centre pair. A further pair of F12s can be used either as conventional floor monitors or as stage fills. The system is powered by MC2 T1000 amplification and mixed through an Allen & Heath 24-channel GL2200, while playback equipment supplied by Marquee included a Tascam MD301 minidisc recorder and Marantz CD6000PRO CD player. The front-of-house drive rack comprises industry-standard BSS FCS-966 Opal Constant Q graphic EQ, Yamaha REV500 digital reverb and a Cloud four-zone mixer. "This was a must," says Rick, "enabling us to tie together backstage, show relay, front-of-house and get talkback onto stage through the FOH mix." A Stonewood Audio comms system was also ordered from Marquee Audio, who provided all the multicore, allowing the venue to install the system themselves.
