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More INNOVASON for major Greek song festival via Enttech SA

There is no doubt that the Greeks love their song festivals. The 38th Thessaloniki Song Festival took place in the POAK Sports Arena in the beautiful city of Thessaloniki in northern Greece in early November 2006. The creative team behind the recent Eurovision Song Contest held in Athens last May, was responsible for the design and running of this show, which included calling on Greek audio production specialists and INNOVASON distributor, Enttech SA to handle all of the audio requirements for the show. Enttech specified and purchased no less than three INNOVASON Sy80 digital mixing consoles especially for the event, all of which were run on an EtherSound network.

Sixteen entrants were selected after nationwide trials to compete on the first day. The criteria demanded original material performed by newcomer artists. An on-site jury in addition to millions of televoters narrowed the selection down to ten who proceeded to the finals held on November 4th. The entire show was broadcast live via ERT SAT and ERT Web, the live internet TV and web channels belonging to ERT, the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation.

The configuration required an Sy80 console at FOH, one on monitors and a third to handle all the broadcast requirements. There was also a 56-mic input Stage-Box which acted as a microphone splitter for all three consoles, and a 48-mic input, 8-output DioCore (an EtherSound-enabled Stage-Box) also distributing microphone signals to all three consoles, but over EtherSound via CAT5 rather than the fibre optic or coax links used for the Stage-Box. All talkback channels were also handled over EtherSound. The monitor console acted as the primary EtherSound master and as the Stage-Box master. Just as they did for Eurovision, Enttech also supplied a full back-up system comprising an Sy80 FoH primary master console and Sy48 broadcast console plus a Stage Box and a DioCore all on a separate independent network.

According to monitor engineer Elias Trintis, who was also responsible for setting up the consoles in conjunction with INNOVASON's Matthieu Le Failler, the whole show sounded fabulous and ran like clockwork. "I've been using INNOVASON consoles for five years now and always enjoyed working on them. However, Eurovision was the first time that I'd used the new Sy80 control surface with Sensoft v10.1, and I have to say I was amazed. It sounded absolutely fantastic, and the new functionality that comes with the latest version software makes it even more flexible and easy to use," he remarked. "Based on the success of Eurovision, we used a similar configuration for Thessaloniki (three Sy80s, a Stage Box and a DioCore) but this time we decided to run the whole thing on an EtherSound network. We also had a full redundancy system, which is imperative on a production as big as this. The problem was that we had a very limited time in which to achieve it. However, with Matthieu's help, we got the whole thing up and running perfectly in just three hours without a single hitch."

Enttech managing director, Yiannis Papoutsakis was equally pleased with the results. "The show did sound excellent, and I'd like to add my personal thanks to INNOVASON who worked around the clock to make it happen. They turned around my order for three Sy80s in less than a week in order to get the consoles to us in time for the show. I placed my order on a Friday, and the consoles were with us by the following Thursday for the festival on the Saturday! They even sent one of their own technicians who worked with our own crew to get everything set up and tested on time. That's not bad going when you consider that the solder was barely dry on the circuit boards! Anyway, the results speak for themselves, and I'm grateful to INNOVASON for pulling the stops out for us when we needed it. That's what I call customer service!"

In picture: Alex Ghanas, system technician; Panagiotis Petrouikolos, FoH engineer; Elias Trintis, monitor engineer; Vangelis Koulouris, FoH engineer; Andreas Vaitudis, playback engineer.

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More INNOVASON for major Greek song festival via Enttech SA

24th November 2006

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