Located in the Chinese province of Jiangxi, the newly opened Wunvzhou Resort offers bothy a tourist destination and a cultural centre, and includes a range of hotels, restaurants, shops and attractions, all themed on the cultural achievements of China’s Hui Muslim ethnoreligious group.

Before the resort’s official opening in July, Chinese A/V solutions provider EZPro was assigned the task of supplying and installing the audio system for the resort’s regular large-scale live performances of Encounter with Wuyuan – performed on a floating stage – in a 3,000-seat outdoor arena.

With daily performances of the show at the heart of the resort’s entertainment output, reliability, ease of use and audio quality were key factors in EZPro’s decision-making process. With this in mind, EZPro opted for an Allen & Heath SQ-7 for mixing duties, partnered with a DX168 portable expander for remote analogue I/O. Additionally, an Allen & Heath SQ-5, also with a DX168 expander, is deployed as a redundant backup system.

Built on Allen & Heath’s XCVI FPGA core, the SQ mixing platform delivers 48 channel/36 bus mixing at 96kHz with ultra-low 0.7ms latency. The integrated SLink port enables plug-and-play connection to Allen & Heath’s ‘Everything I/O’ ecosystem of remote expanders, making it simple to add up to 48 remote inputs to an SQ system. Both mixers are fitted with SQ Dante cards, delivering 64x64 audio at 96kHz or 48kHz, with the Primary and Secondary ports supplying a redundant audio link, via discrete network switches, to the arena’s power amps and loudspeakers.

‘The Allen & Heath system ticks all the boxes; flexible mix position, super-fast set-up and unrivalled ease of use,’ concludes Xiong Wei, Technical Engineer at EZPro. ‘The engineers loved the SQ’s DEEP Processing which enabled them to deliver a studio-quality mix for the live performances. It is no surprise that the client is happy with the result.’