Part of a major overhaul of its technical facilities, the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden has installed Prism Sound Dream ADA-128 multichannel converters to handle analogue to digital conversion across its entire audio workflow. Seven units are up and running on the Royal Opera House’s new Dante network, with an eighth due later in the year.
‘I looked at numerous audio converters but chose Prism Sound because the Dream ADA-128 had none of the shortfalls I was finding with others,’ says Sound, Video and Broadcast Project Coordinator, Daniel Arif. ‘It delivers exceptional sound quality, it integrates well with our other equipment, it has plenty of inputs, and it doesn’t take up a lot of rack space.’
The decision to upgrade the facilities was taken shortly before the coronavirus pandemic, when the ROH Board undertook a health survey of the entire building. This highlighted shortcomings and budget was allocated to resolve them. ‘No major work had been carried out at ROH since the mid-1990s and the survey clearly indicated that many parts of the building – from the technical infrastructure through to the back of house areas – were not where they should be,’ Arif says. ‘Work needed to be done to bring everything up to standard.’
On the technical side, the obvious place to start was the existing sound studio because it could be remodelled quickly without impacting the rest of the building. ‘Although the studio picks up audio from various places in the building, the room itself and the equipment in it is self-contained,’ Arif explains. ‘For this reason, we knew it would give us a good indication of what could be done elsewhere.’
Built in 2004 when the Royal Opera House began broadcasting performances live to cinemas across the UK and Europe, the studio is also used for CD and DVD release recording. Prior to the refit, it contained a Studer console and 5.1 monitoring and behaved very much like a traditional broadcast studio. During the refit, which involved Munro Acoustics improving the acoustics and making the space more comfortable for staff, Arif and his team overhauled the equipment to change and improve the workflow.
‘A lot of our material is mixed by freelance engineers who like to edit in their own studios, which could be anywhere in the country,’ Arif says. ‘They wanted us to make it easier to move recordings around, so to accommodate that we decided to move to an in-the-box workflow using Pro Tools and Pyramix. This meant changing the console as a traditional broadcast desk was no longer suited to that style of working.’
Readyto go fully digital, Arif began working out how to link up with the multitude of microphones used during each performance. A large number of inputs was vital – Arif specified 128 – as was rack space because the studio has a relatively small machine room. ‘It was at this point that I began advocating for the Prism Sound Dream ADA-128,’ he says. ‘I’d used Prism Sound converters at Abbey Road, and had always loved their audio quality. When I saw an online demo for the ADA-128 I realised it was ideal for our needs and arranged a meeting with Prism Sound MD, Jody Thorne.’
Due to unavoidable manufacturing delays, Dante cards for the new ADA-128 units were late shipping, so Prism Sound set ROH up with a temporary solution involving its Atlas audio interfaces. Once the Dante cards were delivered, ROH switched to Dream ADA-128 units.
‘We are still using Atlas interfaces to connect our analogue microphones, but when the ADA-128 Mic cards become available we will be doing everything though the new units,’ Arif adds.
At present, three ADA-128s are housed in the studio’s machine room, which handles 128 microphone inputs from the orchestra pit and stage. Another is in a rack room on the seventh floor where it handles microphones rigged in the opera house’s ceiling and all the amplifiers for the FOH PA.
‘We also have another ADA-128 in a flightcase on wheels, which we use for concerts that have awkward staging,’ Arif says. ‘Our sixth unit is in the ballet studio, a small theatre where we record Insight events for You Tube. Finally, we have a seventh unit that is used for mass audio distribution.’
‘The Dream ADA-128 is the only thing that comes close to doing everything we need,’ Arif says. ‘I/O from FOH and for our broadcast networks is shared through our Dante system and we can switch things around as and when we need to. We recently installed a new Yamaha FOH desk and we have locked down the gains on that and the Prism Sound units so that no one can touch them. If anything needs adjusting it can be done digitally at destination.’
Upgrading the studio and installing the Dante network took two months, with the new FOH desk also installed and linked to the Dante network. ‘We still have a massive analogue infrastructure that runs alongside our new digital set-up, but the whole point of these upgrades is to move to fully digital in the future,’ Arif says. ‘The goal is to save time, deliver workflow efficiencies by creating presets for certain shows, and make the entire system easier to navigate. This is important because the ROH is a busy and important venue, and we need it to be futureproof.’
Prism Sound is now working with the Royal Opera House to develop new features for the Dream ADA-128 that will specifically benefit the live sound market. ‘Most sound engineers associate Prism Sound with recording studios and don’t initially realise what this unit can deliver,’ Arif says. ‘The fact is that live sound and performance venues such as the ROH want and need hig-density interfaces, which is what you get with an ADA-128. We are happy to test new features for Prism Sound because we like building relationships with the companies we work with.’
More: www.prismsound.com
