Located in the London Borough of Havering, The Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch is a 500-seat producing theatre hosting a diverse range of entertainment – placing expensive demands on its technical infrastructure.

A recommendation from the (soon to re-open) Bloomsbury Theatre saw Autograph Sales & Installations assist in a major upgrade to the analogue audio mixing system used the main auditorium. Autograph’s Peppe Mallozzi subsequently recommended a DiGiCo SD9T for its small footprint, input capcity, bus flexibility, rider acceptance and ability to host theatre-specific DiGiCo ‘T’ software.

Mallozzi conducted an introductory training session for the house technical crew at Autograph’s demo facility prior to delivery, followed after delivery by in-depth further tuition at the theatre. The SD9 control surface is accompanied by a single SD-Rack (fitted with DiGiCo’s fibre-optic data transfer option), a UB Madi interface and an Optocore digital multicore.

‘The Queens Theatre Hornchurch produces a lot of actor-musician shows and the T-series software gives us the features we need to respond to a designer’s requests quickly,’ says theatre Technical Coordinator, Chris Howcroft. ‘We put the SD9T in place just in time for our youth theatre production of The Wind in the Willows, and instantly used more channels than we had available on our old system so it’s reassuring to know that we can easily add new racks and I/O cards in the future. The system supplied by Autograph and DiGiCo has also revitalised our PA, which sounds better than it has in a decade.’