Arts Center Excellence: RIVAGE PM5 Delivers Enhanced, Versatile Sound in Abu Dhabi

The Arts Center at New York University in Abu Dhabi is a dynamic and innovative hub, describing itself as “a vibrant laboratory for performance”. Recently, two Yamaha RIVAGE PM5 digital mixing systems were chosen for a major sound upgrade of its three performance spaces.

Founded in 1831 in its namesake US city, New York University (NYU) opened its second degree-granting campus in Abu Dhabi in 2010. Attracting students from 120 nations, a focal point of the campus is the NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center, home to the Theater, Music, Film and New Media, Visual Arts and Interactive Media departments.

The Arts Center includes three performance venues, a project gallery, rehearsal rooms, film editing studios, classrooms and a workshop. As well as showcasing music, theater, dance, film, poetry, family and interdisciplinary productions by students, faculties and the local community, it presents public performances by distinguished professional artists from around the world.

The largest venue is the Red Theater, a 685-seat venue suitable for music, dance, theater and film. It includes a large stage with sprung floor, state-of-the-art lighting, digital and 35mm projection capabilities, an orchestra pit and world-class acoustics with adjustable acoustic panels.

The Black Box is a flexible studio theater with an audience capacity of up to 300, full lighting and sound reinforcement. It can accommodate a wide range of configurations for music, dance, theater and multi-disciplinary performance. Meanwhile, the Blue Hall is an intimate, 150 capacity concert hall with a sprung wood floor stage, digital projection for film and video and is ideal for concerts, small scale dance performances, readings, panel conversations and more.

Previously the Arts Center featured a Yamaha audio system, including CL5 and TF-Rack digital mixers, plus a Rio3224-D I/O rack. The CL5 offered a substantial input mixing capacity of 72 mono and eight stereo, 24 mix buses, eight matrices and more. However, like many similar performance spaces, it was facing the challenge of the escalating scale and complexity of events. By this year, the specifications were proving insufficient. As Kalith Ahamed of Yamaha Music Gulf FZE says, specifically it was "running short of inputs, outputs and mix matrices."

He continues, “As the venue's popularity and the ambition of its programming has increased, so has the demand for more extensive audio routing and processing, which was pushing the existing system beyond its capabilities.”

The Arts Center’s audio team looked at all the available options which would give them the expansion they needed. They settled on a pair of Yamaha RIVAGE PM5 digital mixing systems, supplied by Dubai-based Thomsun Trading LLC. The systems satisfied (and indeed future-proofed) their requirements, as well as being versatile, reliable and internationally accepted by sound engineers.

Critically, the seamless interface between Yamaha’s TWINLANe digital audio protocol - which allows it to transmit up to 400 audio channels through a single optical cable - and the Arts Center’s existing Dante network mean the RIVAGE PM5 systems can be moved between the venues, according to the specific event requirements and unique acoustic needs of each space.

“A key advantage of the RIVAGE PM5 is its relatively lighter weight, compared to its impressive feature set,” says Kalith. “This significantly benefits the in-house technical staff, making the systems easier for engineers to handle, transport and set up between the different theaters, enhancing operational efficiency and allowing for quicker changeovers between productions.”

Of course, the sound quality and features that the RIVAGE PM systems have delivered are equally important. “With such a variety of productions, the Theater Mode has made a big difference in the preparation and pre-production of theater shows, while the hybrid mic preamps with Rupert Neve Designs SILK processing and the plug-ins capacity and quality have lifted the sound quality of productions to a new level,” says Kalith.

“The long-term reliability of Yamaha equipment and its ability to plug into the Dante network has also meant that the Arts Center has kept the previous CL5/TF-Rack based system for use on smaller productions. It highlights how Yamaha audio systems always maximise the return on investment.”