Although the great hall seats around 500 and the small hall 100, the red and gold adorned architecture made scant provision for the sound control room. Resident house engineer, Andreas (Stanley) Lönnquist operates from the tiniest of sound booths, from where he often has to send a monitor mix to the performers as well as deliver a highly intelligible house mix to the d&b system in the auditorium.
Commissioned four years ago, the existing sound desk was ready to be upgraded. Top of Lönnquist's wish list was Digidesign's Venue - but he knew the footprint of the original D-Show control surface would be too large to fit the booth. At this year's PLASA Show in London his problems ended, however, when he found himself face to face with Digidesign's new scaled-down D-Show Profile.
"I had heard from some of the Digi people that it would be worth making a trip to London for," he said. Accompanied by representatives of Soundata Oy, Digidesign's Finnish distributors, attendance at product seminars (and some hands-on experience) quickly showed that the console had been built without compromise - and contained everything needed to improve Lönnquist's workflow.
"I wanted a Digidesign console because it sounds so good and is so simple to configure and operate. We are already a Pro Tools house and use Digi HD and LE software for back-track and sound effects samples."
In particular he had his eyes on the extravagant production of The Sound Of Music, which moves into the theatre at the end of January 2007. "With the fast turnaround of shows we produce and a limited budget for new equipment, this was the perfect solution," he said. "It provides us with the opportunity to store one show before moving onto the next.
"It is four years since we commissioned our last desk and now we will be able to overcome the problems we have with A/D conversion within the desk itself. This is very much a streamlining exercise, enabling us to do away with a lot of our old set-up."
Lönnquist will also take full advantage of the added support of the ECx Ethernet Option card. This will allow him to control the D-Show console remotely from a tablet PC and free him to make EQ or mix adjustments from anywhere in the theatre. "This will be great for productions where there is no monitor engineer," he says.
The theatre already owns a Digidesign 192 I/O 16-channel interface and Command 8 control surface, affording the sound technician extended control of his Pro Tools|HD system. "And with the D-Show Profile we now have a full Digidesign set-up," he states.
(Lee Baldock)
