Queen Mary 2 powered by 45 YAMAHA DME 32 Digital Mixing Engines, PM1D and DM2000 digital mixing consoles - The ultimate in cruise ship luxury selects the best in audio luxury.
Coming in at a staggering 1132 feet long, a mere 117 feet shorter than the Empire State Building, Cunard’s latest flagship, the Queen Mary 2, is big in every way. The last word in cruise ship luxury boasts everything its passengers could desire from gymnasiums to a planetarium. Naturally, only the very best of everything was used during the ship’s construction. That includes the many on-board sound systems used to entertain the full complement of 2620 passengers. It will therefore come as no surprise that Yamaha digital mixing equipment was used extensively.
French based company HMS, a leading provider of services, systems and components in the field of entertainment and internal communication aboard passenger ships, were responsible for every technical aspect relating to the ship’s many entertainment venues.
So when the sound system designers, California based Nautilus Entertainment Design, asked for contributions to the design specification, HMS had no hesitation in suggesting Yamaha digital sound mixing equipment for the various venues around the ship, a suggestion that NED and Cunard were happy to take up.
“We recommended that Yamaha equipment be used for a variety of reasons,” said Vincent Garguet, Sales and Marketing Director of HMS, “not least because although we had to specify equipment anything up to 2 ½ years in advance, we knew that Yamaha equipment would be the most up to date we could get. “Added to the fact that the equipment would be expected to give many years’ service and be user friendly, Yamaha was the obvious choice,” he concluded.
A variety of Yamaha equipment has been installed including 2 DM2000 digital mixing desks, and around 45 of Yamaha’s versatile digital mixing engine, the ‘set and forget’ DME32. In the auditorium HMS installed a DM2000 and 2 DME32’s, while another DM2000 went into the Queens’s Room along with a DME32. The main lounge boasts three DME32 as well as a PM1D system with DSP redondancy capability and DIO8 modules to send digital audio signal to the DME32. 40 DME32’s are spread around 28 other venues on the ship.
Besides installing the sound systems, HMS built all of the entertainment venues including stage rigging, moveable orchestra pits and revolves with internal steps. They also built the ship’s planetarium: a complex, moving structure some 13 metres in diameter by 7 metres deep and shaped like a half tennis ball. With Headquarters at the famous St Nazaire shipyard, home of Alstom ‘Chantiers de l’Atlantique’ who built the QM2, HMS have offices in Italy, Finland and Miami and have serviced the cruise ship industry for 20 years both operationally and on new builds.
Royal Court Theatre
For those who recall the days of the great Atlantic liners there is a certain irony here. It is that the shipyard which built Cunard’s latest Queen Mary, is the same yard that in 1932 gave birth to the Normandie, the great French trans Atlantic liner that on 5 occasions in the late 1930’s snatched the covetous ‘Blue Riband of the Atlantic’ from Cunard’s original Queen.
It’s equally certain that no one will be able to take away the great sound provided by Yamaha on the new Queen.
