The largest of its kind in the world, the Bregenz Festival attracts more than 200.000 visitors each year to enjoy more than 80 performances at its home in Austria. Due to Covind-19, however, no shows took place during 2020. This year saw the festival’s return with Guiseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto performed on the lake stage.

For many years, the festival has placed great value on employing the latest technologies – both to meet the high technical and structural requirements, and provide its audience with a unique experience.

The stage offers unforgettable stage sets, as well as incomparable acoustics. Just in time for the start of the new season, key components of the existing audio system were completely renewed and extended for average monitoring. Two DirectOut Prodigy.MP units, configured in MirrorMode (connected redundantly to each other), are the new link between the individual building sections of the congress centre, including the various audio formats that are used by the event.

Clemens Wannemacher, head of the audio department of the Bregenz Festival, became aware of the key role that Prodigy.MP could play in the complex infrastructure of the festival due to its flexibility and scalability. Originally intended as a multi-format converter between Madi, Dante, Ravenna, analogue and AES3, Prodigy.MP with its extensive DSP resources turned out to be an all-in-one solution.

‘The original concept was, that after format conversion by Prodigy.MP, the signals would be passed on via Madi to DiGiCo 4REA4 rack mixers for processing,’ Wannemacher explains. ‘However, after we understood more about the possibilities of Prodigy.MP, the additional rack mixers were no longer necessary. This not only saved us costs, but also limited the operation to only one device, which makes it easier to find and solve problems. Another important criterion that speaks for Prodigy.MP is the sophisticated redundancy concept with various strategies to minimise system and signal failures.’

In addition to EARS redundancy switching, which detects a signal failure at all digital multichannel inputs and automatically switches to an alternative signal-carrying source, MirrorMode came into play. Here, selected parameters of a main unit are automatically taken over by a mirror unit whenever they are changed. In the event of a main unit failure, it is thus possible to switch to the mirror unit and continue working with an identical configuration.

Such a high level of redundancy is essential for the Bregenz Festival, as the Prodigy.MPs centrally connect the main venues of the Festival House, including the lake stage with galleries, the large hall, the workshop stage and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra’s square, and must function without failures or interruptions.

‘Using Prodigy.MP has simplified various workflows for us, such as the monitoring of all sums generated in the Lawo mc² 96 mixing console, which are transferred to the Prodigy.MP via the Ravenna format,’ Wannemacher says. ’From there, they are available as AES3 and analogue signals to all major protagonists at any time. The same applies to the test operation where we are now in a position, by means of the TouchOsc App, that every user from anywhere in the area can get hold of and control those controllers he really needs.

‘It’s simply adjusting all the screws to create the best experience possible for our audience and our artists,’ he adds.

‘It is always special for a manufacturer’s product management and R&D team when there are customers like the Bregenz Festival who have the opportunity to fully integrate and maximise the use of such a powerful product as Prodigy.MP – a special motivation also for our team,’ says DirectOut MD, Jan Ehrlich. ‘Clemens Wannemacher and his team have really dealt intensively with Prodigy.MP and its possibilities and did not shy away from discussing their own project and the device concept intensively with us and our Austrian partner Pomtec. This way we were able to convey to the customer the maximum of what the product is capable of in its set-up, to integrate it perfectly and to control it comfortably and to increase the redundancy level significantly. In turn, it was a great incentive for us to prioritise a feature we had already planned, the MirrorMode, and offer it to the Bregenz Festival in time for rehearsals for the new season.’

More: www.directout.eu