Specialising in live music broadcasting, Audio Systems Australia (ASA) has recently adopted DiGiCo SD9 and SD11 digital mixing consoles in order to meet the growing demands of its premier clients.
Top of this list is Australia’s Seven Network, for which ASA handles broadcast audio for the Sunrise and The Morning Show programmes. Head of Sound, Randy Fransz, explains the thinking behind the investment: ‘The team at Seven usually consists of Ivan Ordenes of Dubology Studios and myself,’ he begins. ‘When we do an outside broadcast we use Ivan’s DubMobile mobile recording truck, which is fitted out with a DiGiCo DS-00. When Ivan’s truck isn’t available I’ll use his D5 Live console. Having used these consoles regularly for some time without any issue, going DiGiCo for the upgrade was really a simple choice.
‘Size and flexibility were among my reasons. Having all that processing power in such a small device was another. The quiet and very transparent mic preamps as well as ADA was also a winning factor. But it was the bang for buck that made it a no brainer.’
Both consoles were put to work on arrival at Network Seven, where they have been performing tirelessly in a typically demanding live broadcast environment. ‘Both consoles are, more or less, permanently installed at Martin Place studios,’ Fransz says. ‘The SD9 is used as the broadcast console while the SD11 is mounted in a rack on the studio floor for monitors. Having said that, we do take the consoles out from time to time. We just took the SD11 out for Justin Bieber’s performance on Sunrise at the Overseas passenger terminal in Sydney.
‘We are running the two consoles on separate D-Racks to give us more local outputs. The SD11 [monitors] has a D-Rack with the extra 8 line outputs giving Ivan a total of 24 outputs. 16 are used for IEM and eight are used for floor monitors. The SD9 also has its own local D-Rack giving me a total of 16 outputs which are routed to different parts of the studio. As the SD9 is used for broadcast I needed more than the two AES O/O on the console, therefore the second Cat6 connector on the console is routed to a DiGiCo little red box which converts it to Madi. That is routed to an RME ADI 6432 which handles all the AES ins and outs. The Madi port on the console will be used for multitrack recording and playback when the eagerly awaited UB-Madi arrives. The offline editor works great on my PC tablet and it enables me to do line checks by myself.
‘Both console designs are very practical and intuitive,’ he adds. ‘The layout makes sense and the learning curve is minimal. It still has a lot of features that I have yet to use, but hopefully it will be we will see a surround package for it soon.’
The consoles were supplied by DiGiCo’s Australian agent, Group Technologies.
‘I wish these consoles where around when I was still out there doing live gigs,’ Fransz muses. ‘It would have saved my and countless other crew members backs. All that gear in one small package. It sounds so good and it’s flexible enough to tackle big live bands, corporate shows or broadcast.’
More: www.grouptechnologies.com.au
More: www.digico.org
