A PM1D system on the Costa Concordia
With its 112,000 tons, 290 metres length and total guest capacity of 3,780, Costa Concordia, the new flagship of Costa Cruises, is the largest Italian cruise liner and the largest in Europe as far as capacity is concerned.
As well as 1,500 cabins, three swimming pools, a 2,104 square metre wellness zone and a 170-metre jogging track, the ship’s thirteen passenger decks also host not less than 25 entertainment rooms.
Nautilus Entertainment Design (NED) of La Jolla (California) were the designers, project managers and system commissioning managers for the LES (Local Entertainment Systems) of the rooms, which include the 1,400-seat Athens Theatre.
NED worked in close collaboration with HMS Italia, the contractor for on-board entertainment technology, and a company with lengthy well-proven experience in the sector. The NED team’s audio designer, Alan Edwards, stated that one of the new features of a ship of this class is precisely the use of a Yamaha PM1D digital mixing system in the main theatre.
After having sailed with his parents on Costa liners as a child, becoming increasingly interested in the on-board television and video technology (on which he gradually built up in-depth knowledge and experience), while studying telecommunications engineering at the university, in 1994 Paolo Campanelli was offered the opportunity of joining the Costa staff. He immediately accepted the opportunity to make his dream come true and, after years of experience working in all the ships’ technical areas, is now Technical Manager Costa Entertainment and in charge of all the audio, light and video technicians of the entire fleet. He explained, "On ships like the Concordia, we have eleven specialists – a sound engineer, lighting technician, stage manager, stage technician, stage assistant and three room technicians, as well as a person in charge of the television in the Broadcast control room, an assistant and a DJ.”
Campanelli added that innovations on the Concordia also include a totally automated hardware set-up. ”By just pressing the 'play' button on the multi-track machine in the audio control booth, the sound engineer triggers the procedure that - after having run a check of all the show’s components - gives the command to start the show. Thanks to this in-depth automation network, the Athens Theatre’s sound engineer can concentrate on working on the PM1D, to ensure the best possible sound, according to the number of spectators. To ensure the utmost security, the PM1D system includes twin DSP and, thanks to PM1D Manager, shows can also be run from a PC in the event of any problems with the control surface.”
Sound designer and audio programmer Corrado Campanelli (Paolo’s brother) has worked with Costa for several years and his experience in the pro audio field includes work in the live and broadcast sectors, as he explained, “I began working on liners as a backliner at the age of eighteen - I've always loved this work and also worked in the audio sector on FM radio stations.”
After starting out with smaller ships and simpler analogue systems, audio programming for Costa began with the Costa Atlantica, the first liner in the fleet to have a sort of automation.
Corrado continued, “We try to automate all the mechanical operations that are frequently repeated, with the recall of scene snapshots, the control of the surround system and effects, etc. - for example, a really simple thing like muting microphones ‘under’ time code, to avoid human errors and give the sound engineer the possibility of concentrating on the actual sound and the equalization. This is one of the reasons why we decided to cross over into the digital domain, with the installation of a Yamaha PM1D system.”
On the Concordia, automation has been expanded to the nth power, because - when a musical has to be produced that will run for four years, and must be always exactly the same, but will probably involve a considerable number of different technicians, a standard has to be set and maintained - the show mustn’t change at all - apart from a few things that are deliberately left under manual control, such as the equalization of the tracks of recorded music and the microphones.
A library is prepared and stored with the EQ of the singers’ channels, which will then be recalled via time code.
At the beginning of the show, the presets are recalled and from there on things certain remain in manual – there are a lot of “variable” during the show, such as the number of spectators in the room – so the masters of the various zones of the theatre are controlled manually. The Athens Theatre’s sound system has twelve separate surround feeds, L/C/R and a feed for the sub woofers.
Regarding the system’s programming work, Corrado enthused, “It was a great job, particularly as far at the patching work was concerned, because the console has 96 channels and - since it’s on a ship - there are a lot of things that must be interconnected. We therefore exploited to the utmost the convenience of the automation’s recall features and all the flexibility of a completely digital patch.”
Campanelli already had considerable experience on various models in Yamaha’s range of audio consoles, including the PM5D, and on the subject of the PM1D system, added, “It’s intuitive and it wasn’t very complicated to program. One of the functions I used a lot was Selective Recall, and I also decided to exploit all the MIDI Out programming possibilities of the system. Another very nice feature is being able to assign all the parameters of the effects to the ‘rotary encoders’ in the centre of the control surface, to have some ‘physical’ controls, instead of using the screen or mouse and keyboard - the same also goes for the graphic equalizers, which can be inserted in the various zones. In the theatre, there are a lot of zones controlled by matrices and, with an impressive amount of power at our disposal - something like 120,000 Watts in class C - a graphic equalizer is extremely useful and, there again, you insert it, assign it and the DCA faders can be used as the graphic EQ controls.”
As far as the use of Selective Recall was concerned, Campanelli programmed the first scene of the shows in such a way as to recall a sort of set-up all the effects, with the libraries of FOH Left and Right, the initial mix of the surround channels and the microphones. “From then on, with Selective Recall, I programmed the system in order that a whole series of channel parameters were no longer recalled - such as, for example, Left and Right EQ, the microphones’ EQ, the microphones’ faders and the aux sends - a lot of which are left under manual control. We use approximately 80 channels for each show, so this function is of vital importance.”
