Deltona (Florida) High School offers a variety of fine arts activities and electives, ranging from band, chorus and computer arts, to drama, video production and theater technology. Many of these classes and activities take place in the school’s live theater, a fan-shaped auditorium that seats 975 with an elevated sound and lighting control booth at the rear of the audience area.
Much of the theater’s audio equipment dates back to the school building’s opening 1988, with Signature Systems of Florida, headed by Dan Lee, contracted to provide improvements and updates, including a new Allen & Heath GLD digital mixing system, including a GLD-80 control surface and an AR2412 Mixrack, to join new loudspeakers and DSP.
Several different departments use the theater, so Lee helped the school set up the GLD with passwords and configurations customized for each application. Users can log into the system, go to their own setup, and make changes and adjustments without affecting the work done by other departments.
In addition, the school wanted to move the mixer from the control booth to a mid-audience location for certain productions. “The GLD’s built-in digital snake made that easy,” says Lee. “Instead of a multi-channel analog snake, we just ran a Cat-5 cable from the booth to the audience location. And, the mixer is compact and lightweight so it’s easy to move.”
Deltona also takes good advantage of the GLD’s signal processing capabilities and touchscreen. “We re-used a number of existing microphones,” Lee notes, “and the per-channel processing really helped with those mics and their wireless mics.”
Jeff Carson, the school’s auditorium manager notes that the school teaches theatrical sound and lighting design. “Now, we’ve got an up-to-date digital audio mixer for our own productions and it helps the students prepare for theatrical competitions,” he says, adding that the audio system performance at Deltona was greatly improved by the updated audio system and the GLD mixer.
“Digital was a big change for us,” he concludes, “but the GLD was easy to learn and it’s a great teaching tool.”
Allen & Heath is distributed in the U.S. by American Music & Sound (AM&S).