One of the most important literary events in the Hispanic world, it was the sixth time the Hay Festival Cartagena de Indias had been staged in Colombia, but the first time that a technical specialist from the UK office had attended to train local engineers in the art of archiving. ‘We were seeing too much material coming back in a variety of different formats, often low-quality recordings, which in turn restricted what we could do with it,’ explains sound recordist Martin Abell. Abell also returned from the festival with an order for two Roland R-4 Pro audio field recorders.
The Hay Festival organisation currently offers access to an extensive archive of recordings, and is discussing other applications such as commercial podcasts. ‘The better the quality of the recording, the better our options,’ says Abell, who looks for WAV files that can be compressed down for archiving. ‘My task was to show our colleagues in Cartagena how to quality control, which I did with Roland’s R-4 Pro 4-channel recorders – probably the most user-friendly units I’ve ever used.’
Abell used the R-4s as his primary recorders on the full range of events in Cartagena, with guest speakers ranging from Germaine Greer to local Columbian intellectuals addressing audiences of up to 400 people. ‘In one venue, the R-4 was taking signal directly off the desk; in another, we intercepted the mic lines before they went into the desk, which meant we weren’t affected by local equipment provision,’ he says. ‘The sound quality was perfect, and we were happily uploading material onto the Hay Festival websites within one hour of the events.’
Abell’s enthusiasm was echoed by Paul Elkington, Technical Director of the Hay Festival, who felt that ‘the quality of the Cartagena recordings is superb, everything I was hoping for.’
The R-4 Pro’s construction and feature set were well-suited to location recording. The units also have AES/EBU support and SMPTE time code, allowing up to four channels to be recorded at 96KHz/24-bits, monitoring each channel discretely. An 80Gb hard drive will store up to 125 hours of high-quality audio, and instant takeaway backup is possible via standard USB drive.
More: www.rolandsg.co.uk
