Eija Kantola’s Anniversary tour celebrated 20 years for Eija and her band, Omega, hitting a series venues across Finland. Playing venues as diverse as dancehalls, restaurants and cruise ferries, the tour saw a Roland M-480 Digital Live Mixing Console at FOH on the tour, along with M-48 Personal Monitors and S-1608 Digital Snake Stage Units.
The set-up was chosen for the tour by the Finnish singer’s long-term tour technician, Mikko Kiviniemi, a freelance technician based in Helsinki, who works around 100 days a year with Kantola and is no stranger to Roland equipment. The lightweight system occupies a small footprint and coupld be moved easily from venue to venue, and connected simply to house systems where necessary.
‘I have used the RSG products for more than 120 shows,’ he says. ‘It is a reliable and great sounding system with reasonable FOH footprint. The overall workflow efficiency and surface layout is superb as I can run most shows without using a laptop and I was truly impressed by the high sound quality the RSG products provide’.
As the flagship console of the V-Mixing System, the M-480 has 48 mixing channels plus six stereo returns for a total of 60 channels. It also has the ability to control, save and recall all connected M-48 Personal Mixers allowing the FOH engineer to assist in set-up and mixing and to use IEMs to eliminate feedback and reduce the sound pickup from stage microphones.
‘The M-48s are really good to have around as they allow me to focus more on the FOH sound and the artists IEM sound, they are truly a lifesaver for my situation,’ Kiviniemi reports.
For the Eija Kantola tour, M-48 Live Personal Mixers were used for the drummer, guitar and bass players on the stage, enabling each musician to control exactly what they want to listen to during their performance. The S-1608 Stage Unit connected to the M-480 to provide 16 x 8 channels of 96kHz, 24-bit digital audio transmission via Cat5e cable using REAC (Roland Ethernet Audio Communication).
An S-4000-SP REAC Splitter was also used in the setup, the REAC protocol making it easy to split the source audio signals. REAC enables the transfer of up to 40 channels of audio in each direction at 24-bit all over a single Cat5e/6 Ethernet cable or optical link.
