Sitting 3,900m above sea level among the mountains of Shigatse in Tibet, the new Everest Grand Theatre is the highest altitude theatre in the world, and has been dubbed ‘the artistic pearl of the world’s third pole’.
When Chinese A/V specialist EZPro International took on take of supplying the theatre’s sound reinforcement, reliability and versatility were high on the list of criteria to maintain peak performance throughout the year. ‘To meet the needs of the varied performances and activities, flexibility is absolutely critical,’ says EZPro Senior Technical Manager, Zhu Liuwei.
‘With the dLive system, we could store and recall different modes – by using Show Files, Scenes and the Preset Library – to achieve very efficient changes. As the dLive audio engine resides in the MixRack, it is easy to change the location of the Surface if required, and this was another big plus for the theatre.’
For the install, EZPro partnered a pair of Allen & Heath dLive S7000 Surfaces with two DM64 MixRacks to operate as main and backup systems. The S7000 is the largest control Surface in the dLive range, offering up to 216 fader strips via six layers of 36 faders, in addition to 26 assignable SoftKeys, and local analogue and AES I/O. The dual 12-inch touchscreens provide a comprehensive overview of the mix, with the Harmony UI allowing quick and intuitive control of all parameters.
The DM64 MixRack is built around Allen & Heath’s 96kHz XCVI processing core, delivering 128 input channels with full processing, 64 mix outs with full processing, a configurable bus architecture and latency of 0.7ms. The S7000 and DM64 are linked via dual redundant gigaAce sockets and both support a pair of hot-swappable PSUs for added redundancy and resilience.
With Dante used throughout the theatre for audio distribution, both dLive systems were equipped with Dante cards with the Primary and Secondary ports being used to provide a redundant audio link, via network switches, to the power amps and speakers. Additionally, an analogue audio connection from the main MixRack was used to provide an additional level of redundancy in the event of a network hardware failure.
‘The dLive system ticks all the boxes – it offers a flexible FOH position, operational ease-of-use and fast set-up,’ says Zhu Liuwei. ‘And the variety of built-in Deep Processors has greatly helped the FOH engineers to deliver a studio-quality mix for music performances.’
