dbx® Professional Products' DriveRack® 4800 Wins Top Reviews at Broward Center for the Performing Arts

March 07, 2007

Winter NAMM 2007 Anaheim, CA, January, 2007- Booth#7800 — On its 15th anniversary, Ft. Lauderdale's Broward Center for the Performing Arts is also celebrating its installation of the new DriveRack® 4800 System Processor from dbx® Professional Products, a Salt Lake City-based manufacturer of professional signal processing products and a division of Harman International. The renowned Center’s new dbx DriveRack 4800 was able to replace the contents of an entire 5-foot equipment rack, including EQs, compressors and speaker controllers, and offer even more functionality in a smaller space at a fraction of the cost.

The dbx DriveRack 4800 has brought an incredibly comprehensive array of features to the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, ranked by Pollstar magazine as the eighth-highest ticket sales venue in the world and an anchor to the ongoing expansion of downtown Ft. Lauderdale. In the 600-seat Amaturo Theater, the smaller of the two theaters in the Broward Center for the Performing Arts complex, the 4800 gives a consistently stellar performance. Between the local, national and international acts that visit and its use as base for Broward County school system’s SEAS (Student Enrichment in the Arts) program, most every day the theater hosts an audience. A single DriveRack 4800 now manages the extensive Left-Center-Right system of JBL Professional® speaker components that was once controlled by a full rack of processing. As a clear result of streamlining its operation with the 4800, the system now sounds better than ever.

“There are so many things that I can do with the DriveRack system in place that could not be done before,” comments Edmund “Grif” Griffin, Head Audio Engineer at Broward Center for the Performing Arts. As an example, Griffin explains how the 4800’s integrated Feedback Suppression feature helps him maximize the theater’s performance. “We use a lot of floor and overhead microphones,” he says. “At soundcheck, I’ll turn those microphones up just until they feed back. Then I’ll lock the Feedback Suppression feature in and take the values from the 4800’s readout and transpose them to the 1/3-octave Graphic Equalizers I have inserted in each of the microphones’ groups on the Midas Verona FOH console. Now I know precisely at what point my system is going to feed back and I can push it to that limit without worrying that I’ll cross that threshold. I simply couldn’t do that with any other speaker management system. Besides Feedback Suppression, and the obvious system drive elements Crossover, Gain, EQ, Limiting and Delay, there’s so much else it can do — I use the onboard RTA to do my own time alignment and add efficiencies there, as well,” adds Griffin. “The impact of this one single component has had an exponential positive effect on the entire system. You have to love that.”

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