Olympic Cinemas has transformed London’s renowned Olympic Recording Studios into modern cinema and performance theatres. Having begun his sound engineering career at Olympic, Chris Kimsey (The Rolling Stones, Peter Frampton, Duran Duran) has served as sound consultant and engineer for the venue’s live concert series and recording facilities.

Central to the new operation’s live work is a DiGiCo SD11 digital mixing console, which was supplied by HHB Communications. The SD11’s compact size allows Kimsey to set up his mixing position in the middle of the cinema seating with a single network cable linking the mixer to the D-Rack stagebox. Introduced to DiGiCo by engineer and Art of Noise member Gary Langan, Kimsey reckons the SD11 to be an reliable, sonically accurate and future-proof: ‘DiGiCo was highly recommended by Gary, and after hearing how great it sounds I knew we had to go with the SD11,’ he says. ‘Its sonic characteristics are outstanding, especially the mic preanps.

‘The layout of the board is very intuitive and there is an immense amount of R&D that goes into the design of the consoles to make them intuitive and built for speed. I continue to discover more options every time I use it.’

‘Olympic Cinemas are absolutely fantastic and it is great to see Chris so involved with specifying sound equipment and mixing the concerts,’ says HHB Sales Manager, Andrew Hingley. ‘The feature set of the SD11 is outstanding for a console of its size and Chris has been very impressed with the onboard effects and dynamics. It is a great honour to be a part of the new phase of Olympic and to work with Chris on this project.’