Taking on sound duties for Switzerland’s largest music festival, Swiss rental company Hyperson pressed Yamaha’s flagship Rivage PM10 digital mixing console into service alongside several other Yamaha digital mixers.

Paléo Festival Nyon features five main stages, hosting a spread of artists and styles of music, with a sixth area – La Ruche – home to street theatre, circus acts, comedy and visual poets.

Established in 1972, Hyperson has been supplying audio equipment to the Paléo Festival since 1978. For 2016, the company supplied CL5 consoles for FOH and monitors on Le Détour stage and a PM1D on monitors at The Dome. The Rivage PM10 mixed FOH sound at the 15,000-capacity Les Arches stage.

Chris Hauri, chief sound engineer at Les Arches, was impressed by its performance: ‘I spent time learning every aspect of the Rivage PM10, so I knew the answers in advance to any questions I might be asked by visiting engineers,’ he says. ‘Everybody knows Yamaha CL series mixers and they will easily be able to find their way on the Rivage PM10 – which is exactly what happened.

‘I mixed a couple of performances on the console myself, both with and without soundchecks. I found it very straightforward to use and really enjoyed it. There are not many live consoles that allow the sound to really breathe. But there is no harshness in the Rivage PM10’s EQ – when you push up the high frequencies, you just get clean high end. I loved that. There are very few other desks where I can feel that ‘breathing’ in the upper frequencies.’

The console supported a variety of performances throughout the festival, from one-man shows and DJs through to hip-hop, rock, pop and classical music. One challenging performance was that of the Sinfonietta de Lausanne, which involved the highest channel count of around 80, but the Sinfonietta’s FOH engineer Fabien Ayer found the Rivage PM10 a familiar, straightforward experience.

‘I used the offline editor software to prepare for the show and, although I was only able to spend three hours on the console, I quickly found that operating it was very similar to the CL5, which I know well,’ he says. ‘Mixing classical music needs to accurately reproduce the true sound of the instruments and keep the balance as natural as possible. The Rivage PM10 really helps to achieve this, because the preamps sound great and the EQ is very accurate. I was very happy to use it for this performance.’

‘It’s a great console – it sounds really good, it has beautiful preamps and processing, it’s easy to use and reliable,’ Hauri says. ‘I really enjoyed having it in my hands for a few days. I am also grateful to Yamaha’s Jean-Pierre Decollogny, Stefan Zeiger and Ruben van der Goor for their assistance and support.’

‘Yamaha consoles are suited to a very wide range of applications and everyone knows them,’ adds Jérôme Burri, in charge of Hyperson’s presence at the festival. ‘That’s incredibly useful for festivals, because a lot of bands have show files and it’s very easy to accommodate guest engineers. Many artists at Paléo came with CL show files or their own CL series console.’