Playa del Carmen, Mexico (October 25, 2018)—Xcaret México is a resort and amusement park handling 10,000 guests per day in peak season. As a ‘nature park,’ the site offers visitors the chance to explore underground rivers through caves, tunnels and scenery across more than 50 attractions.
But key to a visit to Xcaret México is to see some of the productions at its hotel entertainment venue, the Teatro del Rio, which presents productions of traditional dance and music as well as a horse exhibition, the enigmatic Papantla Dance of the Flyers ceremony, and pre-Hispanic performances. Ensuring that all visitors can properly enjoy them, the busy venue recently upgraded its audio system—a move that included creating an FOH position centered around an Allen & Heath dLive system.
Due to the layout and distance between the stage and FOH, any Cat 5 run was impractical. As such, the installation included two dLive DM48 MixRacks, one positioned under the stage and the second in a control room at FOH.
Supplied by Representaciones de Audio, the MixRacks are equipped with Dante cards and connected via two underground fiber-optic links. dLive’s scene management system enables changes on stage, while all signals are then processed and mixed locally with matrix outputs sent over Dante to the DM48 at FOH, where they are patched to a speaker processor.
The venue’s sound engineer, Diego Andrade, welcomed the update, noting, “dLive is…user-friendly but at the same time can be configured to the smallest detail. With the Dante option card, the system can grow and compliment itself. It’s definitely a high-end system.”
Additionally, the control center consists of three IP8 remote controllers and a touch-enabled computer running dLive Director, all connected through a PoE Ethernet switch. The strip layout on the IP8 controllers follows the scene automation, so that relevant faders are always presented to the operator.
The Head of Audio at Xcaret México, Eduardo Urbina, added that the system “caters for the specific needs of running our show at the Hotel Xcaret México.”
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