Marquee Audio has supplied the first Yamaha DME32 for UK installation to theatre sound system specialists, Aura Sound Design. The Digital Mixing Engine will be installed in the Donmar Warehouse in London's Covent Garden in time for a new production - To The Green Fields Beyond - directed by Sam Mendes, and forms part of a general sound system upgrade, with the Shepperton distributors supplying all the components. Marquee Audio's Jimmy Potter, who earlier this year supplied Aura with a full sound specification for their fit-out for the Almeida Theatre in their temporary home of the Gainsborough Studios, confirmed that a new Yamaha 02R would again fulfil all the sound mixing duties, reinforced through four of Meyer's powered compact, multi-purpose UPM1P enclosures, which will augment the existing system. The new installation has been carefully designed to a fixed budget by Aura Sound Design, whose director John Owens explained that this is the first upgrade to the sound system that the theatre has undertaken since reopening around a decade ago. "The idea was to create maximum flexibility at minimum cost. We have configured the DME32 as an 8 x 12 matrix, bolted onto the end of the 02R through the desk's 8-buss output, to handle all the crosspoint matrixing, delays etc. It's all controllable by MIDI, allowing us to use Richmond Sound Design’s Stage Manager 3000 MIDI Show-Control software to automate all the shows for the theatre."
