The Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, CA, is a massive 14-acre campus. It is home to Segerstrom Hall, a 2,994-seat, opera house-style theater, the campus’ largest facility and a venue for Broadway musicals, ballet, and other large productions. To ensure guests have the best audio experience, six DiGiCo mixing consoles were recently installed.
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Among the 14-acre complex is also the 1,704-seat Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall and the 375-seat Samueli Theater, as well as the 53,000 square-foot Orange County Museum of Art. Many organizations call the Center “home,” including the South Coast Repertory and three resident performance companies: the Pacific Symphony, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, and the Pacific Chorale.
The Segerstrom Center is also home to enhanced sound, thanks in part to the recent installation of no less than six DiGiCo mixing consoles. These include a Quantum225 at front-of-house in the Samueli Theater, and another installed in the control room of the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall. Additionally, the Concert Hall has a Quantum338 Pulse that is brought into the audience space for shows that require an in-house mix position, while a second Quantum338 Pulse serves as either a “B” console at FOH, or as a monitor console, as needed. Segerstrom Hall now similarly has a Quantum338 Pulse installed at its front-of-house mix position, with another one available for monitors. The installation, done by Apex Audio of nearby Huntington Beach, also includes seven DiGiCo SD-Racks spread across the venues, as well as four SD-MiNi Racks.
Not surprisingly, a venue campus this large tends not to make big moves quickly, and John Downey, head audio engineer at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, joked that their previous suite of consoles were verging on antiques. It was time for a refresh.
The search for the next round of desks focused quickly on DiGiCo. “It was the brand and the quality product that everybody wanted, so it was a real easy decision,” he said, noting the frequency with which DiGiCo – and increasingly Quantum – appear on the contract riders he deals with.
As importantly, the consistency of the Quantum operating system across all of the campus’ venues means his own staff—A1 Timothy K. Schmidt at the Samueli Theater, and Phil Harris on monitors, plus James Wilcox, head audio engineer at Segerstrom Hall—can move smoothly between all of the venues as needed. That same consistency also helps the staff with the wide variety of performance types hosted in these multiple venues, which can run from pop and classical music to Broadway shows to educational presentations.
Chris LeBer, president of Apex Audio, had pointed that capability out to Downey a year ago when the updating process was just starting. “It’s a big complex of stages and venues, and they do a lot of different types of shows, so the connectivity between the consoles and their ease of learning and use was big factor in this choice,” he said. “The way Quantum is laid out and the Optocore integration make it as though it was one console for the entire campus.”
But, of course, it’s not, and those consoles will get moved around the campus often. That, said LeBer, is where DiGiCo’s proven value as a touring desk comes into play. “They’re rugged, tour-proven consoles,” he concluded. “It’s a big campus with a lot of stages, but for a DiGiCo, that kind of moving around is a piece of cake. Wherever they go, the workflow is the same. DiGiCo wasn’t just the right choice—it was really the only choice.”