BUENA PARK, Calif.—More than 5,000 attendees flocked to the site of this year's Red Bull Fuel & Fury snowmobile jumping event. Held in early November in Chicago, they witnessed seven of the world's best freestyle snowmobilers at the largest single event of the year.
Edge ShowTek (Northbrook, IL) was tasked with the audio production for the event, making good use of the new AuviTran AVM-500ES unit to maintain an EtherSound network within the entire digital system. The system consisted of a Yamaha PM5D-RH digital console, two Yamaha SB-168ES Stage Boxes, 36 NEXO GEO S8 speakers, 12 CD12 subs split between four towers, six NEXO PS15s, and five NEXO NXAMP 4x4s amplifiers.
The AVM-500ES unit is an EtherSound Network Matrix housed in a 19” 1U rack box for linking and routing up to five EtherSound networks together, Integrating a full matrix router of 320 x 320 audio channels. “The unit worked very well, states Pete Hansen, Operations Manager, Edge ShowTek. The reason we decided to use the AVM-500 was to maintain an EtherSound network throughout the whole system, which would not have been possible without the unit, or at least very undesirable from a cabling standpoint.”
Hansen said the setup for this system was quite unique in that speaker positions were both in front of and behind the Yamaha front of house position. The Edge ShowTek crew used a combination of Cat5 and Fiber Optic cable runs that were fairly long and non-linear with about 200-300 feet between each speaker tower. They were able to save about 1,000 feet of cable run by splitting the ES network in front of, and behind, the front of house position by using the AVM-500.
“We have been using EtherSound as a method of running multi-channel digital audio for years, says Hansen. It's amazing to hear how well the audio fidelity is maintained when you never leave the digital domain, says Hansen. If you are going to use a digital console, you might as well run in a digital format like EtherSound as much as possible. The AVM-500ES allowed us to do just that over the whole system, and it sounded phenomenal.”
“An event like Fuel & Fury was an ideal use of EtherSound networking given the large distances between microphone sources, speaker towers and the Yamaha front of house, notes Trevor Waller, of Edge ShowTek and A1 for the event. With announcer microphones over 600 feet away from the mix position, the ability to send those sources to the Yamaha PM5D-RH console digitally with virtually no line losses was a great advantage in making sure the event could be heard by everyone even over the roar of snowmobiles in the air. The unit was virtually plug and play and allowed us to save valuable setup time, both in its ease of patching and integration into our system.”
For more information on Edge ShowTek, visit www.edgeshowtek.com.
For more information on the AVM-500ES, visit www.yamahaca.com.
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About Yamaha Commercial Audio Systems, Inc.:
Yamaha Commercial Audio Systems, Inc. (YCAS) provides a full line of integrated professional audio products offering complete systems solutions for the broadcast, sound reinforcement/installed sound, touring, commercial recording, and post production markets. With the addition of NEXO to the product line, the company remains the official U.S. and Canadian distributor for all NEXO speaker models. YCAS offers comprehensive in-house and field product training for its customers, a dedicated dealer network, and 24/7 technical support.