Kyle Toth, entertainment technical director at Crystal Cruises explains, "We have the most extensive entertainment and educational programmes in the ultra-luxury cruise market and the Sy48 has become the backbone of our audio support for those programmes. We offer multimedia lectures, classical concerts, headline vocalists and instrumentalists, comedians and several full scale production shows. The most exciting application for the system is definitely our production shows which feature a live orchestra and singers supported by playback material coming from a Mac Pro running ProTools.
"I had been looking for a replacement for our old digital systems for a while as they were outdated, and simply not powerful enough for our needs," continued Toth. "I saw the Sy48 at InfoComm, and the feature that immediately caught my attention was the SmartFAD system. When I saw how simple it was to create a SmartFAD zone with deployment faders, I simply had to see more. The nearly infinite routing capabilities and extreme flexibility of the system really appealed to me."
Toth also appreciated the fact that Sy48 is very intuitive for a live mixing application, yet didn't compromise on the automation. "Our production shows are fully automated so I wasn't prepared to sacrifice automation features for a comfortable 'live' feel. On the other hand, with our tight schedule, I knew that a comfort zone would be important," he remarked.
(Jim Evans)
