The Odeon theatre in Tremblay is part of a municipal cultural centre that also houses an academy of arts offering courses in music and dance. There are two performance venues within the Odeon; the main theatre which offers a wide variety of musical production, from classical concerts to jazz, blues, contemporary music and 'la chanson francaise', while the smaller stage is dedicated to auditions for the arts academy.
Head of sound at the Odeon, Sylvian Fievet, had already decided that the new console would be an Eclipse, having participated in the choice of an Eclipse for the Cité des Sciences science museum in Paris four years ago. His next task was to convince the municipality to release the necessary budget. "It took me almost two years because it wasn't the cheapest option available," recalled Fievet, "but I managed to convince them in the end because I was able to demonstrate that the incredible sound quality and superior functionality of the Eclipse (especially once the GT version came out) compared to the slightly cheaper alternatives from the other main manufacturers far outweighed the difference in price.
"Apart from the sound quality, what I like best about the Eclipse is its configurability," continued Fievet. "The ability to set up the console exactly the way you want according to the specific requirements of the show and/or the engineer is a huge advantage. You can determine the number of inputs, auxes, groups, VCAs, matrices etc., and then decide which faders or Smartpanel knobs you want to assign to those functions. Once it's all set up, the console is then incredibly quick and easy to operate.
"There is no need to dig through menus or layers to find anything - it's all at your fingertips enabling you can concentrate exclusively on the mix and manage your effects with astonishing rapidity. In fact, to make it easier for visiting engineers, Axel [Brisard] from Sennheiser France and I created and saved a basic configuration so that any engineer, whether he is familiar with the console or not, has access to all of his sources, destinations and key functions directly from the control surface."
(Jim Evans)
