Mahen Theatre – located in the Czech Republic’s second largest city, Brno – has recently added four Yamaha SB168-ES stage boxes and four DMEio-ES digital mixing engines to its inventory. Installed by Prague-based Audiopro, the latest Yamaha upgrade runs on an Ethersound audio network, which incorporates an NAI48-ES Ethersound interface to work with the theatre’s two existing M7CL-48 and 01V96V2 digital mixing consoles. “We chose the M7CL because it was the only digital console which met our requirements for reliability and connectivity. It was important that one sound engineer could operate the console or, in the case of bigger productions, that two engineers would be able to work independently on one console – something which isn’t possible with multi-layer consoles. In its price category there is no competition,” said Petr Winkler, chief of sound engineering at the theatre. The theatre is the home of the National Theatre Brno’s dramatic ensemble, staging modern drama and musicals. However, other NDB ensembles also stage productions there, including several opera premieres and ballet performances each year. One of the key factors in upgrading the theatre to a full Ethersound network was the frequency of performances. “One of our main requirements was to reconfigure the entire system in a few seconds, by literally pressing one button,” he says. “We regularly have several performances each day and, of course, the settings on the mixing consoles and effects processors are changed throughout each performance. With virtually every channel used and very little time between performances, resetting thesystem to start the next show was virtually impossible in the analogue domain, but with the digital system it poses no problem at all.” www.yamahaproaudio.comwww.ethersound.com
