Ethan Bade (left) and Alan Busch with the Skirball Center’s new Yamaha PM5D console.
New York (September 23, 2011)—New York University’s Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts recently upgraded its FOH console to a Yamaha PM5D.
Since opening in 2003, the 860-seat Skirball Center has been an educational and community building resource, providing NYU’s first large-scale, professional performance space on campus. The Center works closely with cultural partners to reflect its global urban home by presenting a variety of events in many different languages, a reflection of NYU’s commitment to education through the performing arts.
Skirball handles roughly 120 in-house presentations and co-presentations each season, as well as more than 100 events by other university departments and clients from the community. The venue offers programming spanning the arts: dance, popular and world music, corporate conferences, theatre, family entertainment, comedy, movie and live event viewings and television broadcasts.
Michael Harrington, the Skirball Center’s Senior Director, says, “We are proud not only to have such a unique place in the cultural capital of the world, but to use it for a unique purpose—engaging young audiences, both within and outside the NYU community, in a wide variety of performing arts, including premieres of important and innovative new work from around the world.”
Recently the Skirball Center upgraded its older analog front of house console to a Yamaha PM5D digital audio console purchased from Scharff Weisberg. “About once a month, a client would have to rent a digital board, and it was almost always a Yamaha PM5D,” states Ethan Bade, head audio engineer. “After speaking with engineers who brought in different consoles, we determined that installing a PM5D would eliminate clients’ additional rental costs, so the decision was pretty clear.”
Both Bade and his associate engineer, Alan Busch, are very familiar with the Yamaha digital boards and said the recall features are what sold the Skirball staff on a digital console, as there are several events that return on a monthly basis that have the exact same set up each time. “In addition to engineer familiarity, the Yamaha PM5D was particularly attractive due to its ease of connectivity to the DME (Yamaha’s digital mixing engine) which has also been upgraded from a DME32 to a DME64. We also have a DSP5D on the deck cascaded to the PM5D via a DCU5D. Drive lines to the DME in the amp room under the house are sent over Audinate Dante cards. Our signal paths are now digital all the way from the stage to the amps.”
Skirball Center
www.skirballcenter.nyu.edu
Yamaha Commercial Audio Systems, Inc.
www.yamahaca.com
