After almost a billion Australian dollars was plunged into its renovation, The Star located in Sydney, Australia has been transformed into leisure and entertainment complex. The new facility incorporates a combination of DiGiCo SD10s and SD11s at the heart of the entertainment area’s audio system.
As well as offering numerous other facilities, the former large-scale casino is home to the Event Centre, a 2400sqm ‘world-class’ entertainment space suited to intimate concert settings as well as domestic and international conferences. The room caters for 4000 patrons in concert mode, 3000 guests with half seated, 1200 in a banquet ballroom setting and 1300 in a conference space.
On designing the new audio system for the entertainment space, head of audio at the Event Centre, Ian Brown, explained: “We had a huge list of special requirements the system had to meet: it had to deliver the best sound available today; and be able to mix up to four independent events on one core system while integrating with our HD vision, conferencing systems and broadcast trucks, as well as be able to link to the existing audio system within the casino.”
With such a varied cross section of events being held at the Event Centre year round, the ability to re-locate consoles and re-configure them in various locations easily via optics was another decisive factor in the eventual deployments of the SD11 and SD10s dgital mixing consoles.
“We are able to mix vision on one SD11 in the control room while sub mixing additional vision and playback from the main operating position on the other SD11 while mixing a band and additional mics on the SD10s. We can then bounce a mix to one of the SD11s for a live conference link, then bounce a total mix out for broadcast or streaming from any of the consoles. The possibilities are endless.”
The ultra-low latency of the SD consoles has also ensured that syncing and streaming to HD video is easily achievable.
“The SD system has met all of these challenges with ease. We are not only able to access the hundreds of inputs and outputs across the entire Star Casino property via our extensive Dante network, but we can also link to the other properties in the Echo Entertainment Group or any site worldwide via a secure DVN service,” continued Brown. “We can also stream live over the Internet, and all in HD. The almost complete lack of latency in the system makes broadcast and syncing to vision a snap.”
