Having recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, Vienna Arena marked the milestone with a full audio upgrade to its largest hall. In addition to a new Meyer Sound speaker system, the decision was made to replace the Grosse Halle's existing analogue mixers with an iLive system - comprising an iDR10 mix rack and iLive-144 control surface - at FOH, and a second identical iLive system to manage monitors.
"We contacted a number of console manufacturers to evaluate several digital options. Top of the technical crew's priority list was the design of the desk and the ease of use," comments Thomas Löffler, head of sound at the Arena. "iLive offered a very flexible design due to its Ethersound-based modular concept, which our technicians could operate with ease, and the system provides excellent sonic quality. As we often have visiting sound engineers, we needed a guarantee that they can handle our digital mixer without a lot of training and explanation. The iLive mixer fulfilled all of these criteria."
The FOH stagerack acts as a digital splitter, so that all the mic pre-amp signals are sent digitally via Ethersound over Cat 5 to the iDR10 monitor mixrack, which means input cards are not needed in the rack for stage signals, and avoids the necessity for traditional multicore and splitter hardware.
(Jim Evans)
