A private, postsecondary trade and technical school specialising in audio recording, audio engineering and production education, the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences (CRAS) has adopted 12 Midas M32R mixing consoles for its live sound programme. The consoles allow each student to become familiar with the operation of a professional mixer.
With its main location in Tempe, and a satellite campus in Gilbert, Arizona, CRAS was founded in 1980, and provides education and training in its core discipline – music recording – as well as live sound, audio for postproduction and broadcast audio. Students are trained for positions in a variety of areas of the music, gaming audio, live sound, broadcast and postproduction for film and TV industries.
‘We have a 6,000sq-ft live sound venue on our Gilbert campus with a full PA for the students to work in,’ says administrator, Kirt Hamm. ‘We realised that we wanted to have a more hands-on approach and, rather than trying to crowd everyone around a main FOH console, we set up work stations with the Midas mixers. We can feed a signal to them and with headphones the students can work on a mixing session. We like that the Midas M32R is compatible and sort of a gateway platform to the larger Midas consoles which we see a lot of in the live sound industry.’
‘For final certification, students program the M32R for a large-scale system with standard PA system routing (LR/C bus) and matrix busing for camera and satellite feeds for streaming,’ continues CRAS Live Sound Instructor, Jim Bender. ‘We also use the M32Rs for an additional certification class, in which 12 mixer stations are fed two channels of audio through our Dante networking into their laptops that are loaded with Smaart v8 and the students learn about sound system tuning. The versatility of the Midas M32R makes these tasks in a group setting much less daunting for both students and instructors.’
‘AVL Media Group, distributor for Midas in North America, values its relationship with CRAS,’ says AVL Sales Manager, Kurt Metzler. ‘The school has a stellar reputation, and places a high value on education and supporting the arts. Helping these students in any way possible is paramount to advancing our industry in the future.’
With in-person schooling back in session and the autumn semester looming, Hamm anticipates to a healthy return to both campuses: ‘We offer a single-programme curriculum – 48 weeks in total, which includes a 12-week internship,’ he says. ‘At any given time, there are about 550 students between both campuses. We also have a large student presence with the Audio Engineering Society that furthers the educational goals of our school. What we have set out to do, and a personal goal of mine, is that if a door opens for one of our graduates, they will have the skills to go through it with confidence.’
More: www.avlmediagroup.com
