The Edlis Neeson Theater at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in downtown Chicago recently implemented a pair of DiGiCo S21 mixing consoles, with consulting and purchase provided by Second City Sound & Communications and integration by the company’s Gerry Formicola and Brad Galvin working with the MCA Production team.
The new S21 desks are each paired with a DMI-Dante card for networking plus three DiGiCo A168 stage boxes also connected via Dante. One console serves at front of house and is further fitted with a DMI-AMM (Automatic Mic Mixing) card. The second console is situated in the theater’s audio/video control room where it’s used to mix streams of the events and presentations originating in the venue, and can also be called upon for monitor-mixing work when needed.
“The museum has moved to a visitor model with people inside the museum and theater but much of what takes place here is also available via streaming,” says Matthew Test, the MCA’s audio visual manager at MCA. “Most of the in-person events are simultaneously streamed, and the S21 in the Audio Visual room gives us the flexibility to create a unique mix for the virtual audience in addition to the one from the S21 at front of house.”
Test adds the staff was looking for consoles that could be easily networked together and that offered versatility, flexibility and quality sound, but that were also small and compact to minimize seat loss at front of house and be able to be easily moved and reconnected for other missions.
The MCA production team discovered the S21 as a result of a colleague watching a documentary about the hit musical Hamilton that mentioned the DiGiCo console used for its sound. “That led us down that path, and we learned that the S21 was everything a museum like the MCA needed,” he says. “It was affordable, yet still very powerful and flexible, and had the added advantage of being able to be integrated into the museum’s existing LAN infrastructure.”
The theater’s primary front-of-house engineer, AV technician Sam Clapp adds, “What I like best about the DiGiCo in general is how clean and easily understandable its user interfaces are, as well as the fact that they just look good—very sleek and attractive with cool touchscreens. Perfect for a museum of contemporary art.”
He states that he uses virtually all of the S21’s features, including onboard EQ and compression. “And for someone who learned audio from working on a DAW, it’s so easy to transition to,” he says, noting that he regularly uses the FOH S21’s aux sends for the live streams when not using the S21 in the video control room, setting them up to mirror the main FOH mix, an approach he says is more efficient for some types of shows. Conversely, Test says that he likes that he can use the Dante network to pull pre-fader inputs from the stage boxes to both boards simultaneously, noting that “they can still talk to each other, which is a nice feature for gain-tracking.”
“We also use a group system to collect channels with similar EQ and compression needs, like handheld mics and lavs, and they get routed to the matrix and then sent to the LCR and sub speaker stacks,” Clapp adds. “So there are a lot of flexible routing options. And also the ability to create presets and save them as starting points for different projects. That’s worked well for many kinds of events, from small panels to large-scale shows.”
Audra Jacot’s domain at the MCA’s Edlis Neeson Theater is mostly video, but occasionally, one of the consoles’ mix engineers will step away for a moment and she’s found that she can easily and confidently step in. “I can immediately see that if it’s purple, it’s an aux feed, and if it’s blue, it’s an input,” she says. “And if I’m nearby and someone needs a monitor level moved up or down, I can see what channel they need to adjust. It’s laid out so intuitively, and it just looks great.”
