The Hawth Theatre is one of the south's liveliest arts venues, playing host to a diverse mix of theatre, dance, music, comedy, concerts, film and visual arts. The theatre has been host to hit West End and worldwide musicals including West Side Story and Saturday Night Fever, comedy acts including Eddie Izzard and Jack Dee, and visiting companies including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Following a competitive tender, single source supplier AC-ET was selected to provide the complete order of leading brand entertainment technology products, accessories and custom manufactured items from its extensive stockholding. The company's dedicated Lighting and Audio sales divisions worked alongside each other to deliver over 65 separate product lines.
The lighting inventory includes a wide selection of ETC Source Four and Selecon theatrical luminaires, ETC Eos and Ion lighting control desks, Chroma-Q Plus™ colour changers, as well as various consumables including filter scrolls, lamps and associated cabling custom manufactured in-house.
Audio equipment supplied includes the latest version of the Yamaha M7CL-48ES-SBK digital mixing console, which features a built in EtherSound port and is supplied with three Yamaha EtherSound stage boxes. The inventory also includes Shure vocal and instrument mics, various music stands, Martin Audio Blackline full range loudspeakers supplied in custom-manufactured flightcases and QSC power amplifiers.
For the theatre's audio monitoring system, the division supplied an Aviom personal mixing solution which draws digital audio directly from the Yamaha console using a 16 channel A-Net EtherSwitch card. The audio stream is transported via Cat 5e cable to an A-16D ProAviom Distributor, which supplies audio and power to six A16II personal mixers. The units are attached to microphone stands, enabling individual monitoring via wired headphones.
In addition, AC-ET supplied a Roland Systems Group video mixer to enable the venue to easily mix together live camera and PC graphical feeds as a single output for projection onto screens during performances.
Since the installation was completed, the theatre have used the lighting and audio equipment for productions including Footloose and Beauty & The Beast.
Chris Wilcox, technical manager for the Hawth Theatre, commented, "I'd used AC-ET before so approached them to tender. As well as providing a competitive quote, I was very pleased with the way they handled the project. The company's lighting and audio sales teams provided a really prompt service and accommodated my changes when I needed to find more cost-effective alternatives to meet our budget. Overall, it was a very easy and pleasant experience dealing with them."
(Jim Evans)
