Vienna’s Theater in der Josefstadt has installed an SSL digital mixing system. With its inaugural performance featuring music conducted by Ludwig van Beethoven, it remains one of the city’s most celebrated cultural institutions, staging plays and musical productions with nearby sister venue, the smaller Kammerspiele, since opening in 1778.
The two venues now form a shared production environment built around SSL’s System T platform, that not only allows engineers to mix either in the auditorium or control room but is fully compatible with the consoles in the Kammerspiele.
Located in city centre, the Kammerspiele was the first of the two theatres to install an System T in 2024, because of its powerful feature set for theatre production. Raimund Hornich is the Head of the Sound Department for both theatres and moved on to the upgrade for Die Josefstadt after the Kammerspiele installation.
‘I started in the job three years ago and at that time both places had very old school mixing consoles,’ he says. ‘I had to install a new system with a modern workflow for theatre productions nowadays and SSL provided that.’
Hornich was already familiar with SSL consoles and technologies from his time working at the Burgtheater, Austria’s national theatre, also located in Vienna. Die Burg, as it is called by locals, was the first fixed theatre installation of a System T. That system, like those for Die Josefstadt and Kammerspiele, was supplied by TSAMM Professional Audio.
‘I quickly realised that System T offered the flexibility, scalability and operational consistency that modern theatre productions demand,’ comments TSAMM owner, Mario Reithofer. ‘Vienna has a close-knit theatre community, and once people understood the strength of the platform, interest started growing naturally,’
Hornich agrees, and says he was keen to have System T as the new audio infrastructure for Die Josefstadt and Kammerspiele: ‘I was not only looking for a system based purely on specifications,’ he explains. ‘I wanted a platform that was trusted in real-world theatre operation. We knew exactly how it behaved under pressure, how flexible and scalable it was and where its strengths lay.’
Following Kammerspiele’s upgrade to System T in 2024, attention turned to Die Josefstadt the following year. During the summer 2025 closed season, installation work began on a similar system using two 32-fader S500 surfaces. This was part of a major refit that also included an Audio-over-IP network, a wideband Sennheiser multichannel wireless microphone system and a future-proof d&b audiotechnik PA system.
System T uses Open Sound Control (OSC) to provide real time control of audio objects using the familiar System T user interface for a range of external renderers, directly from the System T user interface. ‘One of the features I value most is the integration with object-based workflows,’ comments Hornich. This feature will allow Die Josefstadt to integrate Soundscape in the future while enabling operators to continue working within a familiar System T ecosystem.
‘The requirement was to make show files interchangeable, allowing operators to move easily between the two theatres, from one venue to the other,’ Hornich says. ‘System T allows us to treat both theatres as part of a common audio ecosystem rather than two completely separate installations. Because both venues share the same console platform, show files, channel layouts, processing structures and operational workflows, show files can be transferred between them with very little effort. That makes it much easier to move productions, technical resources and personnel between theatres whenever necessary’
One of Die Josefstadt’s S500 surfaces is permanently installed at FOH, while TSAMM built a custom trolley for the second so it can be moved into the auditorium during rehearsals. An additional remote unit with 16-faders is also available to be used anywhere in the theatre. There is a similar arrangement at the Kammerspiele, with its 16-fader S500 in its own custom-made stand on wheels.
In both theatres the two desks can operate alone or together, depending on the production. ‘Sometimes both consoles are in use but on other occasions there’s only the big console or the small one,’ says Hornich. ‘The consoles are used across virtually our entire production portfolio at Die Josefstadt and Kammerspiele. This ranges from spoken drama and productions with extensive multimedia content to live music performances and musical theatre productions with significantly larger channel counts and more complex requirements.’ Reithofer adds that an important aspect of the System T and S500s to enable this flexibility is the ability to reconfigure the desks at the touch of a button.
‘What I particularly appreciate about System T is that it was clearly designed to handle complex production requirements,’ Hornich concludes. ‘Theatre productions are rarely static: shows evolve constantly, requirements change and every production brings its own challenges. In repertory theatre, where productions change daily, flexibility is essential.’
More: www.solidstatelogic.com