One of the cultural hubs of Brno, the second largest city in the Czech Republic, on its opening in 1882 the Mahen Theatre was one of the first public buildings in the world to be lit entirely by electric light. This was in response to a spate of fires in gas-lit theatres across Europe.
Installed by Prague-based Audiopro, the latest upgrade adds an Ethersound audio network which features four Yamaha SB168-ES stage boxes, four DME4io-ES digital mixing engines and an NAI48-ES Ethersound interface to work with the theatre's twoM7CL-48 and 01V96V2 digital mixing consoles.
"The theatre's main auditorium uses the two M7CL consoles and a second, smaller stage which uses the 01V96V2," says Petr Winkler, the theatre's chief of sound engineering.
"We chose the M7CL because it was the only digital console which met our requirements for reliability and connectivity. It was important that one sound engineer could operate the console or, in the case of bigger productions, that two engineers would be able to work independently on one console - something which isn't possible with multi-layer consoles. In its price category there is no competition."
One of the key factors in upgrading the theatre to a full Ethersound network was the frequency of performances, as Winkler explains. "One of our main requirements was to reconfigure the entire system in a few seconds, by literally pressing one button," he says. "We regularly have several performances each day and, of course, the settings on the mixing consoles and effects processors are changed throughout each performance. With virtually every channel used and very little time between performances, resetting the system to start the next show was virtually impossible in the analogue domain, but with the digital system it poses no problem at all."
(Jim Evans)
