Stage Directions: The Benedum Center for the Performing Arts in Pittsburgh has added a Studer Vista 5 digital audio mixing console to front of house. Chris Evans, house sound engineer at Benedum, purchased the console through Sound Associates in New York. He chose the console thanks to the fact it felt like analog, but acted like a digital console, including the fact it can act like a routing matrix, its Snapshot function that quickly switches between setups and its cue list function that has been very helpful for the musicals that perform there.
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My stagecraft local is going on a tour of the Benedum theatre, and since I'm going with my sound mini, we're definitely going to be taking a look at this board. In my high school we had a very nice board similar to this one. I think the half-digital and half-analog boards are fantastic and flexible. One of my favorite features that I remember of the board I used was that the house right and house left faders were "tied" together, so they were always at the same level with each other, if you moved one, it moved the other. If you pushed down some, you could un-do the "tie" and control them separately.
With the Digico consoles and the Avid Venue series I do not see why you would go to a Studer console. Most broadway houses have gone to the digico and with the venue's direct linking to protools session I can't see a reason to go to the studer. It is great that he likes the console but this was not a good choice for the Benedum. If the Benedum gets a new engineer this console will be a giant pain because I looked at studers website and I could not find another major theatre that has one of these consoles. Studer's main market is not live performance but TV and video routing.
I'm not quite sure why this counts as a news story. It might be an important theatre in the community, and the sound board might be really awesome, but I don't think it's all that important to share this information. At least not in this format. The overall attitude toward the sound equipment was so overwhelmingly positive in this post that it makes me question whether it might not be possible that Harman was in some way paying for this post to be written.
Finally, technology is able to produce an audio board capable of digital control but feels and is controlled like an old fashioned analog board. The only real difference, it seems, is that I don't have to know nearly as much about audio design and support as my counterpart did twenty years ago. At last. Idiots can run Sound right alongside the truly skilled. Isn't the advancement of technology wonderful?
The Studer Vista 5 is an incredibly cool console, I'm so glad it made it on the Green Page! I don't feel that this article really does it justice however. The Vista 5 is not just a console, but a network that in some ways reminds me of the way modern lighting networks work. The mixer that you see is only an interface for the core of the system that lives in another part of the building entirely. The mixer is connected to the core via only two pieces of Ethernet cable. The other very cool thing about the Studer system is that is comes with several software packages that are customized to the different uses. As Luke mentioned above, there are software packages for radio routing, mastering for TV and movie production, and theatre. The software package created specifically for theatrical live performance is very unique and powerful. I am not as familiar with Digico as I ought to be so perhaps I am entirely incorrect in saying this, but there are no (or very few) other mixing consoles with features created specifically with theatre in mind.
It is great to hear that the Benedum is able to do these upgrades to their equipment. I know a lot of theater are just trying to get by and not close their doors. A lot of the things that this article said I had no clue about but some of them seem pretty cool like having the ability to move around there inputs to different places in the theater depending on the type of event that is happing. All of the things that it is able to do onboard and not have an extra thing that has to do that. I hope that they also upgraded the infrastructure in which all this runs on so that they don’t have to play catch up to keep everything working.
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