Calgary’s Epcor Centre is one of the three largest performing arts centres in Canada and includes seven performance spaces, five of which now feature DiGiCo mixing consoles.
The Epcor Centre covers six floors and annually attracts over 600,000 people to around 960 events. Dr Martha Cohen, Sandra LeBlanc and Vera Swanson officially opened what was then the Calgary Centre for Performing Arts in 1985. It is housed within two historic buildings, the Burns Building and the Calgary Public Building.
Home to the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and featuring one of Canada’s largest pipe organs, the Carthy Organ, the 1800-seat Jack Singer Concert Hall is the Epcor Centre’s largest and most prestigious venue. A DiGiCo SD5 with full Waves SoundGrid Pro package is installed at the Front of House mix position, with an SD10 at monitors and an SD8/24 in an isolated booth. Two SD-Racks and a SD-Nano Rack provide a total of 104 inputs and 88 outputs.
“We installed the first DiGiCo products – the SD8/24 and one of the SD-Racks in the Jack Singer Concert Hall – in 2012. Their proven performance led us to invest much more in DiGiCo this year,” said Jack Jamieson, head sound technician for Jack Singer Concert Hall.
“What really impressed us was the audio quality, especially running the consoles at 96KHz with the SD-Racks. The ability to share i/o racks digitally with multiple consoles was another major plus point, allowing the interoperability of multiple console designs within one system. The improved channel count and extra features available on the SD11i were a major selling point for us, as it makes it an extremely powerful console in a very small foot print.”
“Despite the different consoles, there is excellent continuity of operational ergonomics and audio quality across the entire line,” commented Jamieson. “The T version of the software offers incredible facilities for the Max Bell and Martha Cohen theatres, while the thoroughness of the offline programmability is also very beneficial. Add to that the incredible support from Gerr Audio, and choosing DiGiCo was not a hard decision.
