The University of Oregon’s School of Music and Dance has modernised its historic halls with Dante AV networked video for streaming and control.
The Tykeson Rehearsal Hall at the University of Oregon’s School of Music and Dance is a place where tradition and innovation converge. Built for the Oregon Bach Festival, the hall was designed with attention to its acoustics, making it ideal for early chamber music performances.
Since 2017 the hall’s analog AV system served its purpose of capturing student performances and showcasing the work of world-class musicians. But as the school’s reputation grew and its audience expanded far beyond the physical walls of Tykeson Hall, its analog infrastructure, tied to a single control room, could no longer keep up.
The AV system Tykeson Hall was built around an analog workflow, with all microphones and cameras hardwired to a single control room located in the Bach Festival's boardroom. While this setup worked in the past, it became increasingly restrictive as the school sought to expand its reach. The Oregon Bach Festival brings in hundreds of musicians as well as audiences from across the globe, and demand grew for livestreams and remote access to performances.
However, the analog system required all recordings to be funneled into the single control room, where they were digitised for streaming. This meant that performances could only be managed from one inconvenient location, and expanding the system to other parts of the building would require costly and disruptive rewiring.
The school tackled its challenges by adopting Dante that allowed them to integrate their existing analog equipment into a modern, flexible system. By using Dante-enabled encoders and stage boxes, the school was able to transform its analog signals into digital ones that could travel across the campus network. This hybrid approach—bridging analog and digital technologies—not only modernided their system but did so without disrupting the school’s historic spaces.
At the core of the new system are Yamaha Dante-enabled stage boxes and AJA Dante AV Ultra video encoders. These devices act as bridges, respectively converting analog audio and video signals into Dante-enabled network signals.