Founded in 1963, the Guthrie Theater is an American centre for theatre performance, dedicated to producing a mix of classic and contemporary plays. Since its founding, the theatre has continued to set a national standard for excellence in the field and serves the people of Minnesota as a vital cultural resource.
The Guthrie houses three state-of-the-art stages, production facilities, classrooms, and public spaces. As part of its efforts to remain at the forefront of the industry, the theater recently upgraded its audio production capabilities with the deployment of three new STAGETEC Avatus Series consoles.
ASK Sales’ STAGETEC Veteran Arnie Toshner coordinated with STAGETEC’s Chris Stevens to make the transition to the new consoles seamless. “Working closely with Paul Estby, the Guthrie Theater’s Production Sound Engineer, we installed three new STAGETEC Avatus D consoles—two 36-channel configurations and one 12-channel configuration,” Toshner reported. “These new boards replaced the theater’s STAGETEC Aurus consoles, which provided 19 years of robust, trouble-free performance.”
The Guthrie Theater’s console changeover occurred quickly—with all systems up and operational on day three. Of particular note, the Guthrie Theater was able to retain their existing large Nexus Audio Router and efficiently transition to the new mixing boards—saving time and money in the process. Paul Estby commented, “The transition to the new consoles was handled efficiently, and the preparation shown by the engineering staff at STAGETEC’s Berlin home office complex was exceptional.”
The STAGETEC Avatus D console offers exceptional flexibility. With removable metering displays that not only provide a clear view and reduce the console’s overall surface height, they can also be mounted to suit the environment, such as on a wall or a swivel arm. The mixer’s central controller is equipped with standard TCP/IP interfaces that are used to link to the control surface—providing the ability to have a remote connection over the network, enabling access to the console via a web browser or control software (Apple Macintosh) without any special hardware. Equally notable, when linked to a Nexus network, users can access almost unlimited resources using audio inputs and outputs of any format.
As for the factors that kept the Guthrie Theater audio team squarely in the STAGETEC ecosystem, Estby reports a combination of robust performance attributes, flexible design that maximized the manner in which the new consoles were deployed, and a positive experience with the Nexus router for input / output management.
“We had a very tight timeline to implement the update,” Estby reports. “The flexibility of Nexus allowed us to do updates and to implement the new Avatus systems into our existing infrastructure. We were able to transfer our building-wide (3 theater spaces, 3 rehearsal rooms, and a recording studio) routing into the new Nexus Star which minimized the amount of downtime we experienced. Familiarity with our former Aurus consoles also was beneficial with the new Avatus surfaces.”
