MIAMI, Florida — To provide live entertainment while on the open seas, Carnival Cruise Lines relies on HARMAN’s Soundcraft Si Compact digital consoles for an array of options to meet the needs of its passengers.
Carnival Cruise Lines, offering destinations such as the Bahamas, Caribbean, Hawaii and Mexico, provides entertainment for all ages including casinos, full hair and beauty salons and spas, yoga classes, many restaurants with unique varieties of food, fun and games centers, and many clubs and bars with comedy and live music.
Out of 12 vessels, two of them carry Soundcraft Si Compact 16 consoles, while the remaining 10 each have an Si Compact 24. There is an accompanying stage box for each console on board.
When looking for the perfect console to fit the variety of entertainment needs aboard the ship, Erik Zvanut of Dobbs-Stanford, Soundcraft’s regional representative for Florida, suggested Soundcraft’s Si Compact series because the layout is similar to an analog board and would be easy for the onboard staff to learn. “Once I showed everyone the Si Compact series they fell in love with it pretty quickly,” Zvanut said. “The ease of use and the amount of functionality you get with the board is so much for the compact size.”
On each ship, the boards are mostly used in the theater and nightclub space, which offers live band karaoke. “The fact that the board is small and can be transported easily is huge. There isn’t much extra room on each ship, so having the small desk makes it easy to fit in a corner wherever it is needed. Carnival also wanted a desk that was easy to set up right out of the box without the need to retrain staff members,” stated Zvanut.
James Keaton, Entertainment Audio Supervisor for Carnival Cruise Lines, couldn’t be happier with the purchase decision. “The price point was perfect. Since the musicians usually operate the sound systems, it’s great to have an easy-to-use board that doesn’t need much background training. With a few of the vessels being older, it also helped to connect the stage boxes with CAT5 cable. Much of the copper wire is out of shape, and having the ease of CAT5 allows us to utilize many more inputs and outputs for whatever we may need. We tried to find a universal product that would benefit everyone, and the Si Compact consoles do the trick.”
Many of the settings and features of the Si Compact series benefit Carnival Cruise lines on a daily basis. “Many times we have a group of rotating bands that perform on different vessels,” said Keaton. “Having the ability to save settings and presets for each group makes the transition between acts very easy. Whoever is operating the desk just needs to upload the settings and they are set to go.”
For Carnival Cruise Lines, this is the start of a long-term upgrade to the entire system onboard the vessels. “It’s great that the stage boxes are compatible with the large Vi series consoles. It gives us options to expand in the future, which is our goal,” expressed Keaton.
For more information on Dobbs-Stanford, please visit: http://www.dobbsstanford.com/Pro.aspx
For more information on Carnival Cruise Lines, please visit: http://www.carnival.com/
HARMAN (www.harman.com) designs, manufactures and markets a wide range of audio and infotainment solutions for the automotive, consumer and professional markets — supported by 15 leading brands, including AKG, Harman Kardon, Infinity, JBL, Lexicon and Mark Levinson. The Company is admired by audiophiles across multiple generations and supports leading professional entertainers and the venues where they perform. More than 25 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with HARMAN audio and infotainment systems. HARMAN has a workforce of about 13,000 people across the Americas, Europe and Asia, and reported net sales of $4.2 billion for twelve months ending December 31, 2011.
