Firehouse Productions relies on Dante networking
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Over the years, the company, which has provided sound production systems and support services to major rock concert tours is also integrally involved with sound production for special live events, such as the 2017 International Indian Film Festival held in mid-July at the MetLife Stadium, as well as live events for corporations including Macy’s, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Biogen and Wyndham.
In television, the company has played a key role in producing audio for live broadcasts, such as The Tony Awards, NBC’s The Wiz and Peter Pan, The Daily Show, In Performance at the White House, the iHeart Music Festival and Global Citizen Festival.
“Whether they take place in a stadium or a studio, these events all have one thing in common - they are live. There are no do-overs to get them right,” said Luis Espinal, senior RF/PL technician for Firehouse Productions. “As we move toward more networked architectures, Dante brings the reliability, routing flexibility and capacity we need to do it right the first time.”
He adds: “Given the complexity of today’s networked live sound infrastructures, it’s not enough to just bring in trusted brands of legacy audio gear. If the third-party audio devices don’t network together seamlessly, with uncompromised quality, low latency and spot-on timing, even the slightest glitch could detract from the viewer experience. Dante solves these problems, and now serves as the backbone of our service. With Dante, we can customize networks of third-party audio gear to meet the demands of even the most ambitious live events.”
At the heart of Firehouse Productions’ Dante networking solution are several Yamaha mixing consoles, including the MP10, CL5 and Q1; a Lab.gruppen Lake LM44 digital audio system processor; and several Focusrite RedNet I/O interfaces for conversions between Dante and MADI or AES10 environments.
All Dante audio traffic, data, control and other functions are natively supported over a Cisco SG550X-24P Layer 3 Switch configured within multiple VLANs. Espinal also points to the value of Dante Virtual Soundcard to record and process multichannel audio from laptops.
“Dante is not just a great solution for concerts, or corporate events, or broadcasting,” Espinal concluded. “It’s a global solution that can be easily adapted to the project’s unique technical requirements, with remarkably fast set-up times, low latency and clean sound quality.”
(Jim Evans)
