The largest folk festival in the world, the 189th edition of the Oktoberfest took place on the Theresienwiese in Munich. Across the event’s sixteen day duration, more than six million guests of all ages visited the site, spreading out across streets, tents and beer gardens to take advantage of a huge variety of entertainment on offer, and slaking their thirst with more than seven million litres of beer. One key venue at the site is the Paulaner Festzelt tent, which has been an integral part of the event since 1895.
Germering-based event production specialists Dora Showtechnik handled the audio for the festival’s Paulaner Festzelt venue, where two bands alternate throughout the day, and this year deployed the XTA MX36 console switcher to simplify their workflow. The MX36 was designed to offer a uniquely simple solution to the long-standing problem of routing multiple mixing consoles outputs to a loudspeaker system/system processor. Handling 36 inputs in 2U across analogue, AES and Dante networks, these are arranged in sets of four (to typically support left, right, front fill and Sub feeds from an individual console).
Dominik Hähnel of distributor S.E.A. Vertrieb & Consulting GmbH had drawn Dora Showtechnik’s attention to the MX36: “Dora Showtechnik is a longtime customer of ours and during a conversation with their team about making elements of live projects more efficient, it quickly became clear that the MX36 could make a significant difference to their workflow for this and many other projects. At this year’s festival, for the first time, the bands in the Paulaner Festzelt tent used their own mixing consoles, enabling each front of house engineer a separate direct connection to the PA and the comfort of using a familiar mixing setup. The MX36 also allowed them to connect other essential signals to the PA, including evacuation microphones and media players.”
XTA’s Richard Fleming added: “It’s great to see an MX36 providing a solution at one of the world’s major festivals! Since its launch in 2019, the trajectory of the unit has been very sharply upwards. It’s clear that rental companies and venues alike quickly recognised the advantage it brings by removing the hassle from switchovers in what are often high pressure environments.”
