27 Years of MerleFest Support: SE Systems Relies on Yamaha and NEXOHeld the last weekend of April in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, this year's MerleFest included over 125 artists with area roots such as Alan Jackson and Merle Haggard. The Festival is named for famed guitarist the late Doc Watson's, after his late son, Merle, also a gifted musician. For 27 years, SE Systems of Greensboro, North Carolina has provided audio production for MerleFest, and supporting their efforts this year, Yamaha Commercial Audio Systems, Inc. provided four CL5 digital audio consoles to add to the inventory, which already included a lot of Yamaha-NEXO gear. Two Yamaha CL5s were used for front-of-house and monitors at both the Americana Stage and the Hillside Stage. "All worked flawless and sounded great," states Bryan Smith of SE Systems. "At the Walker Center and the Chris Austin Stage, we used four Yamaha PM5D's at front-of-house and monitors. At the Creekside Stage, we used our NEXO GEO D sound system with GEO subs. On the main Watson Stage, SE Systems provided NEXO 45-N monitors with NEXO NXAMP 4x4 power amps. In the video/recording trailer, a Yamaha O1V 96i digital mixing console was used to route to the DVR's and converters." "This year, a new stage was added to our production," Smith says. "It was a small courtyard style stage called The Plaza used for smaller, local acts. We only needed to cover audio in a small area, so we decided to use eight Yamaha DSR 112's active speakers, four for mains and four for monitors. No subs were required for this stage. The DSR system sounded awesome and it projected just like we expected; the bass was strong, but not overpowering, and a perfect match for this stage." "The Yamaha CL5 is a great-sounding, and versatile console that was perfect for use on the Americana Stage at MerleFest 2014," states Melissa Joplin Higley, who mixed front-of-house. "The console, Dante networking, and Rio input/output boxes performed consistently. I found the CL5 to offer more flexibility and horsepower, and the premium rack effects are a tremendous advantage." Higley said she used much of the CL5's onboard processing. "I particularly enjoyed the custom fader banks, especially since we used a festival patch; it was great to have each band's input list consolidated on one page for easy access to channels, and we were able to quickly and easily adapt to many different scenarios, including hosting guest engineers, patching artist stage snakes into our Rio's, running ears from front-of-house, etc." Jeff Neubauer mixed monitors at the Hillside Stage using a CL5. "I enjoyed the custom page feature that allowed me to just choose the channels that we were using out of the festival page for each act. The ease of Dante to route audio between consoles was also a nice feature, and I also liked the ability to recall parts and pieces of show files." 
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