Roland is ‘the word’ in Hungary right now, as Roland’s M-5000 and M-480 live mixing consoles, and Digital Snakes head out on tour with Grease – the Musical. This 11-date arena tour is produced by long-term Roland customers Szatyi Stage Team who, earlier this year, supplied an all Roland set-up to produce the live stage sound for local TV2 channel shows Rising Star and The Voice.
Designed to accommodate the requirements of large theatre and live sound applications such as the Grease production, the M-5000 was chosen as the FOH console for the tour primarily because of its configurable architecture. László Szatmári, owner of Szatyi Stage Team described the M-5000 and Ohrca design as a solution to fit all the different areas of work his company is active in, such as live sound, broadcast, rental/hire and production. ‘We wanted to find a variable console for many different applications for the long-term future,’ he says. ‘All the new functions and sound quality (of the M-5000) impressed all of our team. We enjoy the huge creativity and possibilities that Roland gives inside this new concept’.
For Grease, the M-5000 is connected to two Roland S-2416 (24x16 Modular Stage Unit), which are set up as a redundant connection using the Roland XI-REAC expansion interface. The XI-REAC provides an additional two REAC ports with 40 inputs x 40 outputs per port. The rear panel of the S-2416 provides AES/EBU connectivity (25-pin D-sub) for eight channels of input or output, enabling connection to speaker processors, amplifiers and other devices capable of AES/EBU input or output. Input via AES is assigned to Channels 25-32 and output is selectable by a mode switch. With two REAC connectors – main and backup – a redundant REAC network is possible. If a problem occurs with the main line, operation instantly switches to the backup with no interruption to the audio. The S-2416 is also the first Digital Snake capable of a cascade connection. Switching the device to Cascade mode and connecting another Digital Snake makes it possible to expand inputs and outputs up to 40x40 channels.
A 48-channel Roland M-480 console was also chosen for monitors. Here, inputs from the band are relayed via a Roland S-4000S-3208 Digital Snake (32x8 Modular Stage Unit) and a Roland S-1608 (16x8 Unit) split separately from the analogue output.
‘Péter Halász, sound engineer from Grease, has used the M-480 many times and he likes Roland Digital Mixers because the reliability and stability is always 100 per cent,’ says Gergὄ Márkus, Sales Manager at Roland Eastern Europe. ‘After they checked the sound quality of the M-5000, he was impressed with the improvement. The engineer particularly liked the user fader layers on the M-5000, describing them as essential for handling that type of mixing structure, and also the Anchor function as “genius”. The USB I/O feature is helpful for this show because they are using Ableton Live for backing tracks.’
