Milton, Ontario, Canada (May 2, 2017)—The Milton Centre for the Arts, completed in the fall of 2011, is home to multiple venues—and multiple Yamaha digital live mixing consoles as well.
Centered around the Mattamy Theatre, seating 497 people, and the smaller MinMaxx Hall, which can accommodate 198 patrons, the Milton Centre owns a number of Yamaha digital consoles including a 01V, DM1000, LS9-32 and M7CL-48ES. Now the Centre has added a Yamaha CL3 Digital Audio Console, one Rio1608 input/output box, and an Ri8-D input box, provided by Westbury National in Toronto.
“The audio backbone of the Milton Centre for the Arts is built on the BSS London Architect DSP, and with the new Dante integration, the direct digital link into the DSP from all of our consoles has done wonders for us by increasing our capacity, simplifing the Centre’s operation and extending the life of all the equipment by a considerable margin,” said Bill Zeilstra, Coordinator for Technical Operations at the Centre.
“We’re happy with the enhancements the Yamaha equipment has provided us,” said Zeilstra. “The most important part of the upgrade for us was the transition to Dante. Since we have five Yamaha consoles in our inventory, switching to Dante was quite easy, and because we don’t have to retire our old equipment, we’ve effectively doubled our capacity. The move to a Dante network actually gives a pretty good insight into the style of our operations, more so than any other example I can think of. And, never again will I underestimate the benefit of the mini-YGDAI slot.”
The Centre runs the entire gambit of performances; primarily a roadhouse built to support the Milton community and its performing groups, which includes live music and dance recitals as its main components. Last season, MCA supported over 40 performances in 30 days by six different companies.
“For MCA, live music is only a portion of what we do. And in typical roadhouse fashion, what happens next in the facility can change substantially from day to day and production to production. We also have a very diverse range of clientele who have significantly different needs and levels of support required from MCA. All this means is that there is no hard and fast way we do things when it comes to our technical operations. In some cases, we literally pick up our entire operation, move it to a different venue (within the facility), turn it 90 degrees from our standard configuration and make it go. As such, we really needed something very flexible that can operate in more of a ‘star’ configuration and keeping our overall capacity up and available. Dante allows us to do this with ease. I can now use any Yamaha console for any application in any part of this facility, with minimal physical patching to get each one up and running. The venue was built around an Aviom 6416 input/output infrastructure that is still used in conjunction with the Dante equipment. It’s all working like a charm.”
Milton Centre for the Arts
http://www.miltoncentreforthearts.ca
Yamaha Corporation of America
http://www.yamahaproaudio.com
