Key to the broadcasting technology educational programme operated by Deer Park High School is a 350-seat live theatre equipped with professional rigging and lighting, as well as video recording and presentation, and a high-performance audio system.

Located 20 minutes north of Spokane in Eastern Washington, the school provides a broad curriculum of college prep and career studies to its 675 students, using the theatre as a teaching aid as well as a function facility. The latest addition to its technical facilities is an Allen & Heath Qu-32 digital mixer, provided by American Music & Sound, and which replaces an analogue desk that now serves the production room.

‘This is a teaching facility and our students run all of the systems at a live event including video, lighting and sound’, confirms Dan Huffman, who heads the school’s production department. ‘Live production is an important part of our educational programme.’

‘The Qu-32 is smaller and less intimidating than the analogue board, but it has plenty of capability and I can even use the line inputs to connect more than 32 sources and access them on different digital layers,’ he says. ‘The Qu-32 normally resides in a mix booth at the back of the theatre, however it can be moved into the seating area when required for complex productions. Alternatively, operators can take an iPad into the theatre and move around while controlling the mixer by way of a Wi-Fi link.

Huffman configured the Qu-32’s first layer as a default for simple events: ‘Almost anyone can operate the mixer in this set-up,’ he says. ‘Just turn it on, and hand a wireless mic to the presenter.’

For more sophisticated dramatic and musical performances, students have set up scenes and layers, and they’re learning to optimise the DSP and reverb for an individual performer’s voice. ‘That helps us learn by doing, and we’re using more features each time we turn it on,’ Huffman reports.

He plans to use the Qu-32’s multitrack recording capabilities soon, and says his students are looking forward to the school’s first big theatrical production: ‘The programme director is excited about using the Qu-32’s scenes to coordinate the audio with his production,’ he says. ‘The Qu-32 is like a lighting control board in that way. And, we’ll be using even more of the mixer’s capabilities by then. So far, we’ve probably only tapped about 25 per cent of what this mixer can do.’