The audio demands at Forest Hills were rigorous. As part of the creation of this multimillion-dollar, state-of-the-art fine arts facility, the designers created an auditorium for musical performances. Originally, facility owners designed a system with 64 microphones on stage and wanted to run them to the projection booth in the back of the auditorium to a patch panel with a connection to the front-of-house mixing booth. In addition, all these mics would be routed to the side of the stage at the monitor mix position. Later in the design stage, the management decided they wanted to add a TV studio and would need access to all of those mic inputs, exponentially increasing the size of patch panels, cabling and amplification systems.
After evaluating the system's demands, the engineers and designers at Central Interconnect decided to use the AudiaFLEX system, which provided distinct advantages. As an alternative to patch panels the firm's engineers built portable, 32-mic input and output racks. Instead of running tens of thousand of feet of wire and installing thousands of connections, Central Interconnect's installers merely had to run a Cat 5 network cable.
Arlen Smith of Central Interconnect, said: "We did the whole thing digital, so anyplace they would want to pick up or drop 32 mics they only need to plug in the portable patch unit and they're in business." AudiaFLEX also allows the operator to route signals via a laptop computer. Furthermore, the system provides security of intellectual property for performing artists since the mic cables can't be used to split off to seed illegal recordings.
"Using this system, the operator has a totally effortless method of changing patch panel configurations on the fly," Smith noted. "This sort of control is only possible because we used AudiaFLEX. I believe this is the first facility in the nation to be built like this. Nothing I know of is capable of providing of a mic network matrix this large. We selected AudiaFLEX because it was more capable than anything else we looked at. Biamp is known for manufacturing a quality product and AudiaFLEX is very versatile. Best of all, the customer loves it."
(Lee Baldock)
