The Darwin Centre live events bring resident experts and specialists from around the world to talk about their work or explore significant specimens from the Museum's collections. The free events, which are also webcast on the Museum's website, are informal and lively with audience participation encouraged. However, the Museum found that the audio system was unable to cope with the demands resulting from live situations and selected Allen & Heath's iDR DSP system to replace it.
"The original audio equipment, designed before the Darwin Centre opened in 2002, was unable to separate microphones individually - all microphones were grouped together to a single output fader. There was no way to control individual voice levels and vocal characteristics against each other. This made things very difficult in a situation where there can sometimes be several experts and audience members talking at the same time," said Alex Triggs, the Darwin Centre's new media technician. "The Allen & Heath IDR-8 digital audio signal processor offered a solution to these issues, without the need for a reconfiguration of the system or the extensive disruption of re-cabling that installing a typical analogue mixer would have entailed."
The IDR-8 rack unit is situated in a control room but functions can be accessed remotely via a small PL-6 fader panel and PL-7 LCD situated at the Darwin Centre Live technical desk. Preset functions on the iDR mean that any number of programmed settings, such as EQ, can be instantly recalled on the PL-6 and viewed on the PL-7. This enables the sound operator to have immediate control over live events.
"The sophisticated parameters of the iDR DSP functions allow the Museum's sound engineers to establish up to 250 audio presets, which can be easily configured on the iDR unit itself or over a PC network using the accompanying iDR Software Manager. iDR is also 'friendly' to non-technical users and we plan to expand the Museum's system to provide their presenters with limited access to simple functions," concluded Allen & Heath's area sales manager, Jamie Ward.
(Lee Baldock)
