Following the industry’s broad acceptance of DAWs in the recording of critical concerts, the uptake of workstations in live mixing is taking shape. Not only does the use of a DAW reduce the size of the recording rig, it also opens up the use of a huge array of plug-ins, offers large channel counts without taking up any more space in the auditorium and offers higher resolution DSP than is generally available with a conventional live mixing console.
A recent example of this featured French accordionist Richard Galliano playing with the Orchestra Camerata Ducale; a 19-piece chamber orchestra under the direction of violin soloist, Guido Rimonda. The venue was the Sapienza in the University of Rome, and the programme covered Bach, Vivaldi, Piazzolla, Gardel and Galliano’s own compositions.
‘I thought that this would make an easy way to do the concert but the other big improvement was to be able to use Merging Technology’s Horus networked audio interface,’ says Igor Fiorini of VDM Studio in Rome. ‘We were able to put the mic preamps onstage, and I just had a Cat6 cable to connect all the lines to and from the stage.
‘Even though we have had no problems with reliability, my colleagues in VDM Design developed our own embedded PC for our Pyramix system, which we call demiQuaver. So with just a monitor, one Horus, our computer and one cable, we have the whole front of house set-up. With this quality of signal path, we needed the microphones and speakers to match, so I used a rather rare large-diaphragm DPA for Mr Galliano and DPA 4099s for all the other instruments.’
Fiorini’s preference for monitoring is d&b audiotechnik, and for this assigment he chose a T-Series set-up with two elements and two subs driven by D6 amplifiers. He also used Monitor Max stage speakers for the musicians.
‘We decided that it would be interesting to do this event at 192kHz, which is very easy to do with the Pyramix/Horus combination,’ he says. ‘What surprised us was that it made a real audible difference. Now we know how simple and how good it is, we can do similar concerts in this way. It provides benefits for everybody.’
More: www.merging.com
