Originally opened in 1932, when English seaside resorts were enjoying good times, thousands of people came to witness theatrical productions and lavish musicals in a venue where the audience is on the shore of a lake and the stage on an island in the middle of it. But by the 1970s the theatre was in decline, its biggest claim to fame during that decade being a regular host venue for British television's It's A Knockout. Hosting its last performance in 1986, the decaying remains of Scarborough Open Air Theatre lay forgotten for over 20 years, until its recent £3.5m restoration.
Subfrantic Production Services provides the revived venue's audio infrastructure and is deploying its Yamaha inventory at a number of events this year. First was the gala opening performance, held on 23 July, for which two of the recently-launched M7CL-48ES were cascaded together via ADAT cards to form a 96-channel mix position at front of house, with a standard M7CL-48 at the monitor position. Six SB168-ES stage boxes provided the onstage feeds, with an EtherSound multicore providing the necessary link.
"We'd been using the standard M7CL-48 for some time, but it was our operations manager Sean Murphy (who also handled monitor duties at the event) who convinced me to invest in the new ES version," says Steve Davies, Subfrantic proprietor and general manager. "I was a bit sceptical at first, but I'm very glad he did, for a number of reasons."
One of those reasons was the theatre's lake, beneath which has been installed a network of pipes for multicores and other infrastructure cabling to be run through.
"We were going to get a copper multicore made especially for the venue, but the EtherSound Cat 5 link made a lot of sense financially. We intend to leave the infrastructure in place, so I'd rather leave 100m of Cat 5 cable than £6,000 of copper," says Davies.
"Another issue was with the pipes themselves - it's not a straight run, so getting a standard multicore through would have been a nightmare. On top of that, when we opened the pipes up they were flooded, so when we arrived with the Cat 5 we were very glad we'd gone down that route. There is a lot of unpleasant stuff in that water, which you really wouldn't want to have to clean off a big multicore."
"The audio quality of the M7CL48-ES is a significant step up," Davies continues. "It has brought it a lot closer to the PM5D, but you still have the M7CL's user interface, which I really like. And it's a really flexible console."
Providing the musical accompaniment for the event was the Orchestra of Opera North. Jose Carreras and Dame Kiri sang both solo and together during the show, which also featured Huddersfield Choral Society, the whole production tied together by compére Brian Blessed.
Using a total of around 90 channels, the orchestra used a combination of DPA, Schoeps, Neumann, AKG and Shure microphones, Blessed had a wireless DPA headset and the opera stars each a pair of Schoeps mics.
"It was a standard setup for this kind of music," he says. "Some engineers prefer two mics for the lead vocalists so they can have different inputs for FOH and monitors, but we had the second as a spare, just in case. The channels were all paired at FOH, so it was a failsafe."
(Jim Evans)
