Red Hook, NY (November 2, 2017)—Firehouse Productions has been the audio provider for countless tours by Coldplay, Radiohead, Peter Gabriel, Sting and many others; shows for the likes of the NFL, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and other organizations; and corporate events for Macy’s, Apple, Amazon and others. They’re all high-profile clients, but with that visibility comes increased pressure for its systems to work flawlessly. With that in mind, Firehouse has increasingly turned to Audinate’s Dante audio-over-IP networking for many of its clients when it creates audio systems with many moving parts.
Modern audio network architecture has to accommodate many stakeholders, from house sound to monitors to recording to broadcast trucks and more. “Given the complexity of today’s networked live sound infrastructures, it’s not enough to just bring in trusted brands of legacy audio gear,” said Luis Espinal, Senior RF/PL Technician for Firehouse Productions. “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.”
For many of its clients now, Firehouse brings together a selection of disparate audio products that all have interoperability via the Dante protocol in common—numerous Yamaha mixing consoles, including the PM10, 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.
“For a very advanced show, we need an integrated solution that’s manageable from end-to-end from a single interface,” Espinal said. “Dante is the only solution I’ve found that makes it easy to integrate so many third-party audio devices together. At every event, we can count on Dante to save us hours of work that were previously spent running cables and setting up patch panels.”
Audinate Group
https://audinate.com
