The 70-piece Orchestra is a regular client of System Sound, whose director Simon Biddulph has spent some time looking for an effective way to meet the Orchestra's front-of-house requirements. "With this standard of orchestra, playing outdoors, everything needs to be close-mic'd. Also there is a big rhythm section that tends to dominate so the balance engineer needs to have control over it. We ordered the Yamaha DM2000 with six additional input modules, on top of the 24 built into the console, effectively customizing it for the orchestra. It can't be more than two and a half feet wide, and is really easy to load in, yet it offers 96 channels and does everything we want it to do."
The Performing Arts Symphony Orchestra is the only orchestra in Britain dedicated to touring nationally, and is also the only commercially viable symphony orchestra in the country. Their summer calendar of classic proms programmes is performed at stately home venues. "We need a lot of channels, but the big desks we'd been using are just too hard to deal with in practical terms," continues Biddulph, who is also the technical director of PASO. "Last year, Marquee Audio really helped us out by lending us a demo Yamaha desk, so naturally we went back to them when we decided to buy that very same DM2000 package."
(Sarah Rushton-Read)
