Caption: CPS Group and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra spent several weekends staging seven outdoor showsUK - With the live music industry heading indoors for the winter, Yamaha UK has had time to reflect on the company's most successful summer yet. As well as the major events like Glastonbury, T In The Park and many others, Yamaha technology allows many smaller productions to take place outdoors. Christchurch-based CPS Group used the company's equipment to provide a highly innovative audio system at a series of orchestral shows.CPS Group and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra spent several weekends staging seven outdoor shows at Osbourne House on the Isle of Wight, Mercedes Benz World in Weybridge, Meyrick Park in Bournemouth and Broadlands House, Romsey. All featured a Classical Prom, with the latter three venues adding a second night titled Symphonic Disco, featuring West End artists performing numbers from shows such as Mamma Mia and Saturday Night Fever."The project had a high channel count and very limited time for sound checks, so we needed to be able to pre-programme the consoles for instant recall of settings at each new venue," says CPS director and event front of house engineer Chris Caton.The solution devised by the company's project manager Mike Newman involved threeM7CL48-ES consoles and five SB168-ES stage boxes on a pair of Ethersound networks."The first network had a single M7CL48-ES and three SB168-ES stage boxes, providing inputs from the string and woodwind sections of the orchestra," Newman explains."The second had two M7CLs on it, which acted as the main front of house and monitor consoles, with 32 inputs from two further SB168-ES."We then had 16 channels from the first network routed into the 16 remaining channels of the FOH console on the second network, via AES. These 16 'stem channels' were then bussed out to the monitor desk over Ethersound. It allowed the main monitor engineer access to the 32 inputs from the network his desk was on and also the 16 channels of stems from the other network, without any form of decoding."The AES output from the FOH M7CL sent the mix directly to the PA, while 24 monitor mixes (21 on IEMS) were sent either via the Omni outputs of the monitor console, or via the Ethersound network, to the pair of stage boxes.(Jim Evans)
