The Classic Open Air Festival at the Gendarmenmarkt has been held in Berlin for the past 27 years – but making it happen presents new challenges each year. Classical music in the open air is demanding in terms of acoustics and requires a special sound reinforcement system, not least because its critical audience is accustomed to concert hall sound. This year, for the first time Berlin-based manufacturer Stage Tec was involved in the five festival evenings.

A Nexus system was used as the FOH matrix and routed the output signals from two mixing consoles to the PA system. The gain-delay matrix of the DSP board performed signal processing within the Nexus system. The level delay matrix employed enables simultaneous distribution of input signals to multiple outputs. Here, gain and delay could be set individually for each input per output bus. The outputs of the gain-delay matrix were used to control different sound reinforcement zones at the Gendarmenmarkt and the individual mixes were output to the sound reinforcement system via dynamics units (limiters) over Dante. This achieved a uniform level across the wide Gendarmenmarkt square, allowing the audience to experience the five concerts with the best sound.

‘The modularity, system stability and mechanical construction of the Base Device convinced me. When operating via the Nexus GUI, we noticed a positive feature. Several routings could be prepared in advance,’ explains Ben Spindler, freelance sound reinforcement specialist. ‘Afterwards they could be switched without clicks. Using states saved previously, I could quickly switch between two scenarios (zone and stereo sound).’

Event equipment and service provider TSE (Technik und Service für Events AG) used Nexus as the FOH matrix on this project. Nexus was able to demonstrate that its variety of analogue and digital interfaces, DSP functionality and low-latency networking make it the go-to solution for all types of sound reinforcement tasks.

More: www.stagetec.com