American Airlines Center is the NHL’s Dallas Stars and NBA’s Dallas Mavericks arena. The venue was inaugurated back at 2001, and recently the Center invested in a Lawo mc²56 MkIII mixing console with redundant A__UHD Cores providing 512 DSPs for the front-of-house and monitor mixes. A Power Core for Dante conversion, Lawo A__madi6 and A__mic8 stageboxes, and a V__pro8 video processor for MADI embedding and LiveView™ video thumbnail generation are also included.

The objective was to offer a superior show to its fans, both sporting and concert fans. To achieve this, the American Airlines Center wanted a console able to handle various styles and types of signals. The team found that the Lawo’s mixing system’s capacity and flexibility allowed engineers to configure the system without compromising on anything.

“Having a large number of AUX mixes means we can route signals in a variety of ways and mix sources in a more discrete fashion than before,” said Jeff McGinnis, A1 Engineer at American Airlines Center. “Not being limited by a fixed console setup is a major benefit of the Lawo system. Having video thumbnails next to the faders is a boon when checking things in advance. We furthermore appreciate the features that are unique to the Lawo, including the various GPI/O options and remote VNC access to other machines so we can grab control of things directly from the console.”

“A couple of other features that helped sway our decision,” states American Airlines Center’s Facility Engineer, Scott Davidson, “was that Lawo is not just an audio company but also has a very robust IP-based video routing solution that runs on the same backbone infrastructure as our audio console. Plus, Lawo’s solution has growth capabilities/possibilities built in. If we ever need to add a second console for a broadcast-type mix, or for a portable console to use around the building, we can do this with our Lawo system and share resources in a highly flexible way.”