Designed by architects BDP for two clients, Tesco and Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council, the new civic centre has rejuvenated this run-down area of town, offering two swimming pools, a sports hall, private gym and dance studio. Its curved roof wraps tightly over the building, and the stylish modern design is carried through into the large theatre at the heart of the building.
Equipped by Stage Electrics, the auditorium has a dedicated control room housing the 48-channel RSS M-400 V-Mixing console, which offers the house and visiting engineers a toolkit of 16 busses, channel and bus DSP, four stereo FX processors, four graphic EQs, built-in stereo recording and playback, and built-in multi-channel split port.
"We've all found it very easy to use," says Steven Jefferson of Link4Life, the trust which runs the Arena on behalf of the Borough Council. "The venue opened, and with immediate effect, transferred all the activities and visitors from the old leisure centre which was due for demolition. We were under huge time pressure to get up and running very quickly.Nevertheless our team of technicians has found the M-400 operationally simple to learn as they go along, especially because we can store presets on a USB key and just load them into the console as the events come in."
The Middleton Arena is unusual in that a dividing wall can be pulled across the centre of the auditorium, pulling back the upper set of bleacher tiered seating to create two smaller spaces that are popular for all kinds of council and corporate meetings, line dancing, small shows, and rehearsals on the proscenium arch stage. There they have stageboxes for the RSS S-1608 and S-4000 configurable digital snakes, which return signal to the M-400 V-Mixer via low-cost lightweight Cat5e distribution using REAC (Roland Ethernet Audio Communication).
(Jim Evans)
