Considered to be the prestigious gateway to the London 2012 Olympic Park, Westfield Stratford City shopping centre boasts over 250 stores, a seventeen screen all-digital cinema and the UK’s largest casino. To satisfy sound requirements for The Atrium – a large, multi-purpose meeting and performance area located in the centre – a substantial installation of Yamaha pro-audio was provided by Elstree-based Media Powerhouse. Installed were three Yamaha digital mixing consoles – an M7CL-48, M7CL-32 and LS9-16 – each with a DME64N, plus Dante-MY16-AUD, MY16-ES64 and MY16-EX interface cards.
Six Yamaha SB168-ES stage boxes were also supplied, which can be allocated to the mixing consoles as required. This allows any console/stage box combination to be used in any of the performance spaces, depending on the requirements of the show.
Said to be a key advantage of Yamaha digital equipment is its ability to translate between multiple digital audio formats. The consoles and respective stage boxes use Ethersound with each DME64 acting as an Ethersound-Dante converter, and each combination has a gigabit Ethernet switch attached to it. A fibre port connects the system to the building’s infrastructure, where a central Ethernet switch with multiple fibre transceivers connects to all the other switches in a star topology.
“The flexibility of the system means that any console can connect to any loudspeaker system in the complex, with multiple output routing taken care of over Dante and switched via a simple interface on the DME. One fibre optic cable is all that’s required to connect the consoles and stage boxes to the building’s entire audio infrastructure,” says Andy Huffer of Yamaha dealer HD Pro Audio, who acted as consultant to Media Powerhouse for network design and programming.
“The success of the system at Westfield London meant that Yamaha was the obvious choice for the new development. Its ability to work with different audio formats at the same time was key, but reliability and engineer familiarity are further key reasons why Yamaha equipment plays such a key role in this project.” www.yamahaproaudio.comwww.media-powerhouse.com
