The Bregenz Festival returned this summer
Austria - The Bregenz Festival attracts more than 200.000 visitors every year. In the months of July and August culture lovers from all over the world can enjoy more than 80 performances. Due to COVID-19 no shows could take place. The festival returned this year for its75th anniversary and to experience the revival of Guiseppe Verdi's Rigoletto on the lake stage.
For many years, the Bregenz Festival has placed emphasis on the latest technologies, on the one hand to meet the high technical and structural requirements, and on the other hand to provide its audience with a unique experience through maximum system stability and quality.
Just in time for the start of the new season, key components of the existing audio system were completely renewed and extended for average monitoring. Two Prodigy.MP from DirectOut, configured in MirrorMode (redundantly to each other), are the new link between the individual building sections of the congress centre, including the various audio formats that are used.
Clemens Wannemacher, head of the audio department of the Bregenz Festival, became aware of the Prodigy series at an early stage. During the planning phase, Wannemacher gradually became aware of the key role that Prodigy.MP could play in the complex infrastructure of the festival due to its flexibility and scalability. Originally intended as a multi-format converter between MADI, Dante, Ravenna, analogue and AES3, Prodigy.MP with its extensive DSP resources turned out to be the all-in-one solution.
"The original concept was, that after format conversion by Prodigy.MP, the signals would be passed on via MADI to DigiCo's 4REA4 rack mixers for processing,” says Wannemacher. “However, after we understood more and more about the possibilities of Prodigy.MP, the additional rack mixers were no longer necessary. This not only saved us costs, but also limited the operation to only one device, which makes it easier to find and hopefully solve problems in case of errors. Another important criterion that speaks for Prodigy.MP is the sophisticated redundancy concept with various strategies to minimize system and signal failures."
Jan Ehrlich, managing director at DirectOut adds, "It is always special for a manufacturer's product management and R&D team when there are customers like the Bregenz Festival who have the opportunity to fully integrate and maximize the use of such a powerful product as Prodigy.MP - a special motivation also for our team.”

Latest Issue. . .