Renowned Amsterdam music venue Paradiso has installed SSL Live consoles for both its FOH and monitor positions, with an L500 for front-of-house and an L300 for monitoring.

Paradiso opened in 1968 as the Cosmic Relaxation Center Paradiso, after an abandoned church was occupied by hippies who aimed to turn it into a music venue. Since then it has hosted some of the biggest bands and artists in the world, including Prince, The Rolling Stones, Red Hot Chili Peppers and U2 – who see the Paradiso as an essential and stop on tours that normally fill venues many times its size. It’s also one of the busiest venues there is, with an extraordinary throughput of acts, both new and established, from all genres.

Having invested in a new Adamson PA system, the Paradiso team turned their attention to audio consoles with a short list of candidates and three days of testing. The criteria were simple – reliability and flexibility, allowing visiting engineers to work without a long learning curve. Above all, the consoles had to sound fantastic.

‘Because of the names we have coming here, we have to be at the top of our game,’ says Paradiso Head of Sound and Production, Marian Emmen. ‘System failure is not an option.

‘Around 20-30 per cent of acts bring their own FOH desk, monitor desk or both. The rest will be using the SSLs, and might only have ten minutes to learn to use them. Sometimes we do mini festivals where we have five bands on in a night. We have one sound check, and the rest has to be done on-the-fly.

The desks were supplied by Dutch pro audio specialist and SSL partner, Audio Electronics Mattijsen. ‘In Amsterdam there is great support from AEM – a solid company that has its own service department, which makes our system engineer very comfortable when it comes to maintenance and support, Emmen  says. ‘Also, SSL is a well-known company with a great reputation for support and that played a role in our decision to buy the consoles.’

It was during the test sessions that Paradiso’s Principal Sound Engineer Dick Versteegh was convinced: ‘It got into me – it had the wow factor,’ he recalls. ‘Other consoles have a lot of toys, but with the SSL I thought, ‘this is a sound desk... Everything has its place. It sounds musical. Everything has space without being separate...’

‘I also like the crazy amount of routing you can do. Some like it easy and simple, I sometimes like it a bit complicated. With this you can do either. With the Stem busses, being able to route to an output or another buss, I find myself dreaming about how I might layer a drum kit.’

For visiting engineers who have not experienced SSL Live before, the set-up can be easily simplified to familiar input channels, traditional buss types, and straightforward fader layouts. ‘If you set it up properly,’ continues Versteegh, ‘An engineer can ‘get it’ within five minutes and start mixing straight away. And of course it really helps that you can change things without disturbing the sound. That’s a big improvement on what we can do now.’

‘The Amsterdam Paradiso is a legendary venue that has hosted an unbelievable string of the world’s very best artists in the centre of Amsterdam,’ says Audio Electronics Mattijsen, Product Specialist, Rafael Nagelkerke. ‘It’s a four-decade long Who’s Who of music.

‘In practice, Paradiso is a highly sophisticated and efficiently run operation with dozens of engineers doing over a thousand shows per year. We are extremely proud the Paradiso team decided SSL Live consoles were the one and only solution of choice after careful evaluation and demos.

‘Like SSL recording consoles were part of laying down many of the most legendary albums, we’re proud SSL Live consoles will be part of many memorable performances to come.’