As the event staging company for a number of Fortune 500 companies, meeting and event planners and producers across the United States, Showorks is responsible for some critical projects, and reliability, efficiency and crystal-clear sound are always essential elements. With that responsibility in mind, the company chose a Pro64 digital snake to connect the stage to front of house and for signal distribution to monitors and recording.
"Aviom's Pro64 system is the simplest way of splitting audio between multiple consoles while offering a low noise floor in a design that's lightweight," says Showorks project manager Mark Allen. "It's a lot easier to run Cat 5 or fibre than a piece of copper with 64 channels in it."
The scale of Showorks' typical events is exemplified by the national sales meeting for Toys R Us, Inc., which took place in the Boston Convention and Exhibition Centre and featured multiple speakers on stage and entertainment by Boston legend Peter Wolf, former front man for the J. Geils Band. For the band, Showorks provided an Aviom monitor mixing system, including 10 A-16II Personal Mixers that were fed from an AN-16/i Input Module connected to the monitoring console.
This console and the front-of-house console, which each had three 6416Y2 A-Net Interface Cards installed, received audio from three 6416m Mic Input Modules on stage. The mic pres were able to be controlled remotely from both of Showorks' consoles using m-control for Yamaha digital consoles. "We used the Aviom Pro64 digital snake with two Yamaha M7CL 48-channel digital audio consoles," explains Allen. "Splitting 48 channels has never been easier. Our noise floor is getting lower and there are no ground loops, no buzzes or hums when we use the Aviom snake."
(Jim Evans)
