San Francisco Opera’s historic 3,006-seat War Memorial Opera House has completed a technical upgrade to full Audio-over-IP working with two Lawo mc² audio production consoles and related I/O, unifying the theatre’s audio production systems and bringing to fruition a project with roots going back nearly seven years.
San Francisco Opera acquired its first Lawo console, an mc²56 MkII, in 2015, for postproduction use. It was a good testing ground, as the Opera’s technical staff looked to the future, planning replacement of a previous, non-networked console with a looming EOL date.
‘Having such an important part of the system no longer serviceable was not something we could accept,’ says Master Audio/Video Engineer, Doug Mitchell. ‘First, the consoles needed to be native Ravenna and, second, they needed to be made with the quality and detail that opera and symphonic music required.
‘Having already purchased an mc²56 MkII with Nova73 Compact in 2015 for our postproduction facility, we were already very familiar with Lawo,’ he continues. ‘In fact, we chose Lawo in 2015 because of its Ravenna audio capability – we had been using Merging Pyramix for multitrack capture and postproduction mixing since 2007, and using Horus and Hapi AD/DA interfaces for all of our remote mic preamps since 2012. Integrating that first mc²56 MkII into our existing infrastructure made connectivity much simpler. It was a no-brainer to continue with Lawo for our live sound consoles.’
The new installation – whose main purpose was to bring together San Francisco Opera’s Live, Broadcast and Post Production audio facilities within a 96kHz infrastructure – includes an mc²56 MkIII audio production console with a redundant A_UHD Core for the sound booth on the fifth floor backstage, along with A__stage64 and A__madi6 stageboxes, a Lawo V__pro8 video processor, and a Power Core RP with VisTool RP remote control for rehearsal and god mics. At orchestra level, an mc²36 MkII console provides FOH sound. The system’s backbone is managed with two Arista 7020 switches.
A second ambition, integrating the FOH console with the main sound console, was also accomplished, as both new consoles now share all sources. Outputs feed two DirectOut Prodigy.MPs via Ravenna and are matrixed prior to loudspeaker distribution.
‘One big challenge with the previous equipment was lack of DSP, which required a lot of outboard processing gear,’ Mitchell explains. ‘Since we had previously installed AoIP infrastructure with our first Lawo console, it was easy to replace the old stageboxes with the Lawo A__stage64 using existing wiring, and adding the Arista 7020 to tie the Consoles, A_UHD cores, A__stages64 units, A__madi6 and Power Core.
‘It all went together very easily,’ he reports. ‘We have two Horus with 64 mic preamps in the orchestra pit, a Horus with 32 mic preamps for RF mics, 16 mic preamps for itinerant use DSL, a Hapi with eight mic preamps in the ceiling for hanging mics, and a portable Horus with 32 mic preamps for special events. The ability to easily share all the Merging pre’s and the A_Stage units with both mc²56s, the mc²36 and the Power Core really shows the beauty of an all-IP audio network.’
He highlights a further advantage of the new system – flexible workflow.
‘We share the theatre with the San Francisco Ballet, and we both have very similar, yet different needs. In my 20 years with the company, the changeover that happens twice per year between us has always been quite complicated and took a lot of time, as it required a lot of patchbay changes. Now, we finally have a system large enough and flexible enough that all we need to do is change out some microphones and recall a different snapshot in the mc²56 MkIII, mc²36 MkII and the Power Core, and we are ready to go.’
More: www.lawo.com
