In June 2011 the Royal Welsh College's dream of having its own world-class performance and rehearsal spaces became a reality as it opened its doors to new £22.5m facilities, including the 180 seat Richard Burton Theatre and the 400 seat Dora Stoutzker Concert Hall. A recording studio was also built to support the concert hall which can be patched into all the new rehearsal and performance spaces. Their event calendar encompasses over 300 public performances each year including orchestral concerts, recitals, drama, opera and musical theatre, making the choice of audio equipment to satisfy these varied applications an important long term project.
Supplied by Reading based AV hire and sales specialists SFL Group, the M-480 joins an M-400 Digital Console along with an extensive stock of Digital Snakes including S-1608 stage units, S-0816 FOH units and a pair of S-0808 8 x 8 I/O Units. Additionally each of the new venues has a REAC (Roland Ethernet Audio Communication) S-1608 stage box built into their rack rooms.
This all works together to ensure the college has a flexible, transferable and modular system with every part of it 'plug in and play'. One of the most important reasons for choosing the M-480 was that, thanks to the Roland REAC technology, the M-480 could integrate so seamlessly with the existing equipment.
The M-480 is used primarily in the recording studio attached to the main concert hall, whilst the M-400 remains in the theatre, but they can be swapped over if the features of one desk suit a particular performance better than the other. Senior technician Matt Rogerson had been impressed by the ease of use and the flexibility of the RSG products so when the sound desk in the concert hall recording studio needed replacing, it made perfect sense to him to choose the flagship M-480.
"The ease of use of the Roland products are very high on our priority list - and all the features are built in to the M-480 so we don't need any outboard - the same with the recording to USB function - we don't need any extra hardware, it's just easy."
(Jim Evans)
