Since opening in 1974, Main Auditorium at the Palais des Congrès de Paris performing arts and convention centre, has hosted an average of 150 shows each year, including internationally-acclaimed ballets, operas, symphonies and pop concerts. Seeking a new audio console to accommodate high-profile productions and fast-paced turnaround, the Main Auditorium’s three-man audio team selected a Solid State Logic Live L500.

Alongside the 3,723-seat auditorium, the venue features two TV studios, 20 conference rooms, 85 meeting rooms and three smaller auditoria. ‘The challenge for us is having a sound system that satisfies the size and functionality requests of our clients,’ the Palais des Congrèssound team – Laurent Maury, Sylvain Demay and Thomas Guardenti – explains.

‘In the Main Auditorium, we three sound managers are responsible for the sound system and all related audio activities, whether doing our own mixing or assisting guest engineers. So, we need to make sure that we have the highest quality products in order to satisfy everybody well into the future. Finally, after two years of research, we chose the SSL Live.’

Used for all Main Auditorium conferences and concerts, including those with connections to external services such as television productions and uplinks for corporate events, the SSL Live was installed to integrate with the venue’s existing audio infrastructure. The hall’s fan-shaped seating has no balcony and its mix position is 27m from the stage, behind a mid-house cross aisle. Its loudspeakers cover the audience with flown left and right arrays of L-Acoustic V-Dosc with dV-Dosc down fills, a Kara centre cluster, Arcs floor fills, MTD108 and Kiva front fills and SB28 subwoofers. Backstage, two 32 x 32 5U SSL stageboxes, totalling 96 channels (including the 32 console inputs), are redundantly connected via co-axial Madi to an SSL Blacklight II Madi concentrator that connects them to the FOH mix position via a single multimode fibre per side.