Requiring the largest use of SSL Live mixing systems to date, the recent World Chess Olympiad was accompanied by a full concert version of the musical, Chess, in Tromsø, Norway The production called on the Norwegian Arctic Philharmonic Orchestra, a choir and an ensemble of leading Norwegian musical performers, with three SSL Live consoles for the sound mixes.

Supplied by Bary Sales in Oslo, the FOH and monitor consoles shared 64 inputs from the band and soloists, while the third was used to submix 86 orchestra channels down to six stereo stems.

Engineer Espen Andersen was at the helm of the orchestra console, delivering the stem mixes to the main FOH console. The layering, VCA and snapshot automation capabilities of Live were used to control both the mix and solo portions. FOH engineer David Solheim and monitor engineer Stig Kamonen used Live’s automation system to store and recall scenes, which were particularly valuable on the monitor console running 71 mix buses, feeding effects, in-ear monitors, wedges and personal monitoring systems.

 

‘I was stunned by the exceptional audio quality and dimensionality of sound from the SSL Live,’ Solheim says. ‘The console provides tremendous detail and the response of the controls is very precise. A competing console was being used at FOH to mix two guest artists who were also playing with the orchestra. The same six stereo orchestra stems were sent to this console, so it was very interesting to have the opportunity to compare the audio quality through my SSL Live as well as the guest console. I think we all were a bit surprised by the difference in quality – listening to it through the SSL Live was like hearing a stereo mix compared to a mono mix.’

Each of the Live consoles included onboard Blacklight II I/O. The set-up also used six 32 channel ML 32.32 analogue stageboxes, a D 32.32 AES/EBU stagebox and two BL II.D Madi Concentrators. The analogue stageboxes provided the engineers with shared access to a total of 192 remote-controlled SSL Super Analogue mic/line inputs and 192 line outputs, while the AES/EBU stagebox facilitated use of 16 pairs of AES/EBU digital I/O at 96kHz for driving the PA mains. SSL’s BL II.D Madi Concentrator provided redundant pairs of SSL’s Blacklight II connections, each of which are capable of carrying 256 channels of 96kHz digital within a single armoured fibre cable.