COSTA MESA, CA – Apex Audio provided six DiGiCo Quantum consoles to Segerstrom Center for the Arts, which maintains several venues on its 14-acre campus. The largest is Segerstrom Hall, a 2,994-seat, opera house-style theater.
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The 2004 comedy-drama The Terminal had Tom Hanks’ character trapped in New York’s JFK airport due to a diplomatic snafu, but the subtler story under that narrative was how the airport had almost every service one needed to stay there, from food to retail. From an arts perspective, that’s not unlike what one can find at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California, whose 14-acre campus is home to Segerstrom Hall, a 2,994-seat, opera house-style theater, the campus’ largest facility and a venue for Broadway musicals, ballet, and other large productions.
The complex also hosts the 1,704-seat Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall and the 375-seat Samueli Theater – a multi-purpose facility, for jazz, cabaret, theater, and special events – as well as the 53,000 square-foot Orange County Museum of Art. And many organizations call the Center “home,” including the South Coast Repertory and three resident performance companies: the Pacific Symphony, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, and the Pacific Chorale. Any patron of the arts would be as aesthetically well sustained as the film’s airport inhabitant – and with several nice restaurants to choose from.
As importantly, they’d also find some great sound at Segerstrom Center, thanks in part to the recent installation of no less than six DiGiCo mixing consoles. These include a Quantum225 at front-of-house in the Samueli Theater, and another installed in the control room of the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. Additionally, the Concert Hall has a Quantum338 Pulse that is brought into the audience space for shows that require an in-house mix position, while a second Quantum338 Pulse serves as either a “B” console at FOH, or as a monitor console, as needed. Segerstrom Hall now similarly has a Quantum338 Pulse installed at its front-of-house mix position, with another one available for monitors. The installation, done by Apex Audio of nearby Huntington Beach, also includes seven DiGiCo SD-Racks spread across the venues, as well as four SD-MiNi Racks.
Not surprisingly, a venue campus this large tends not to make big moves quickly, and John Downey, Head Audio Engineer at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, jokes that their previous suite of consoles were verging on antiques. “We take very good care of them,” he says, “but it was time. Those consoles weren’t being supported anymore.”
The search for the next round of desks focused quickly on DiGiCo. “It was the brand and the quality product that everybody wanted, so it was a real easy decision,” he says, noting the frequency with which DiGiCo – and increasingly Quantum – appear on the contract riders he deals with.
As importantly, the consistency of the Quantum operating system across all of the campus’ venues means his own staff – A1 Timothy K. Schmidt at the Samueli Theater, and Phil Harris on monitors, plus James Wilcox, Head Audio Engineer at Segerstrom Hall – can move smoothly between all of the venues as needed. “The ability to use a single surface that operates the same in all the spaces enables our engineers to be able to go from room to room and do what they need to do without any substantial learning curve,” he explains. “And then, to that end, everything we bought were nearly identical systems. All seven SD-Racks are identical and they can roll from space to space as needed. They’re all on HMA fiber and configured similarly.”
That same consistency also helps the staff with the wide variety of performance types hosted in these multiple venues, which can run from pop and classical music to Broadway shows to educational presentations. “Whether we need one channel or an entire console – or even two consoles for a show – everything is on the Optocore loop, as are the SD-Racks that drive my processors,” he says. “That allows me to load a file without having to massively reconfigure things to accommodate whichever ‘flavor’ we’re doing at the time.”
Chris LeBer, President of Apex Audio, had pointed that capability out to Downey a year ago when the updating process was just starting. “It’s a big complex of stages and venues, and they do a lot of different types of shows, so the connectivity between the consoles and their ease of learning and use was big factor in this choice,” he says. “The way Quantum is laid out and the Optocore integration make it as though it was one console for the entire campus.”
But, of course, it’s not, and those consoles will get moved around the campus often. That, says LeBer, is where DiGiCo’s proven value as a touring desk comes into play. “They’re rugged, tour-proven consoles,” he says. “It’s a big campus with a lot of stages, but for a DiGiCo, that kind of moving around is a piece of cake. Wherever they go, the workflow is the same. DiGiCo wasn’t just the right choice – it was really the only choice.”
For more information on Segerstrom Center for the Arts, visit www.scfta.org. Apex Audio can be found online at www.apexaudio.com.
