The Royal Opera House in Stockholm Takes a New Surround Studio into Use

The Royal Opera House in Stockholm, also the National Opera of Sweden, was founded by King Gustaf III in 1773 and is close to 250 years old. The current theatre is situated in the same place as the first Opera House, which was taken into use in the 1780's and demolished in 1892 to make room for the current building that was taken into use in 1898. Needless to say it is challenging to run a modern Opera company with a big staff of singers, musicians and ballet dancers in an old building. Still the opera has managed very well to implement a lot of high tech solutions in the old building in terms of lighting, stage and sound technology.

Because Sweden is a large country in terms of square area but with a moderately small population, one has to travel a long distance to enjoy a performance by the National Opera Company.

One solution to reach out to people around the country is to create a Cinema Cast so that people can go to their local cinema to enjoy a Carmen, Rigoletto or Turandot performance in a high class direct broadcast. To be able to produce these broadcasts in the quality required the company has invested in a surround sound studio of the highest class in its acoustic design as well as in the choice of equipment.

The core of the studio is a Studier Vista console with a Merging Technologies DAW attached to it.

The audio monitoring is by Genelec and comprises five units of the Model 8351 coaxial three-way system and subwoofers. Lars-Göran Ehn (pictured) is one of the sound engineers at the Opera House.

Lars-Göran has been instrumental together with chief sound engineer Tony Dickman, in putting the system together and they are more than pleased with the result.