Everest Grand Theatre Scales the Heights With Allen & Heath dLive

Nestled 3,900m above sea level amongst the mountainous peaks of Shigatse, Tibet, the recently completed Everest Grand Theatre holds the accolade of being the highest altitude professional theatre in the world and has been dubbed “the artistic pearl of the world’s third pole”.

When Chinese AV solutions provider EZPro was handed responsibility to supply the sound reinforcement system for the theatre, reliability and versatility were high on the list of criteria to maintain peak performance throughout the year.

“To meet the needs of the varied performances and activities, flexibility is absolutely critical,” explains Zhu Liuwei, Senior Technical Manager of EZPro.  “With the dLive system, we could store and recall different ‘modes’ – by using Show Files, Scenes, and the Preset Library – to achieve very efficient changes. As the dLive audio engine resides in the MixRack, it is easy to change the location of the Surface if required, and this was another big plus for the theatre.”

For the install, EZPro partnered a pair of Allen & Heath dLive S7000 Surfaces with two DM64 MixRacks to operate as main and backup systems. The S7000 is the largest control Surface in the dLive range, offering up to 216 fader strips via 6 layers of 36 faders, in addition to 26 assignable SoftKeys, and local analogue and AES I/O. The dual 12” touchscreens provide a comprehensive overview of the mix, with the Harmony UI allowing quick and intuitive control of all parameters. The DM64 MixRack is built around Allen & Heath’s 96kHz XCVI processing core, delivering 128 input channels with full processing, 64 mix outs with full processing, a configurable bus architecture, and class-leading latency of 0.7ms. The S7000 and DM64 are linked via dual redundant gigaACE sockets and both support a pair of hot-swappable PSUs for added redundancy and resilience.

With Dante used throughout the theatre for audio distribution, both dLive systems were equipped with Dante cards with the Primary and Secondary ports being used to provide a redundant audio link, via network switches, to the power amps and speakers. Additionally, an analogue audio connection from the main MixRack was used to provide an additional level of redundancy in the event of a network hardware failure.

“The dLive system ticks all the boxes. A flexible FOH position, ease-of-use and fast setup” concludes Zhu Liuwei. “And the variety of built-in DEEP Processors greatly helped FOH engineers to deliver a studio-quality mix for music performances.”