Under its partnership with Berklee College of Music, Power Station recording studios in New York City underwent a major renovation featuring equipment upgrades and studio redesigns. As part of the studio upgrades, a need for an improved in-ear monitoring solution was addressed using Allen & Heath’s ME-1 personal monitor mixers.
‘We had a custom analogue system in place before, which was great, but it was limiting when recording some of the larger Broadway casts,’ says Power Station Studio Technician/Audio Engineer, Mark Rucci,
The studio went through a few options before landing on the ME-1, which offers 40 channels of mix inputs, as well as channel grouping, user presets, built-in ambient mic, and a dimmable OLED display with channel names. ME-1 mixers can also be added indefinitely to a system to suit the needs of large performance groups.
Rucci admits that he’s lost count of how many ubits the studio has: ‘Somewhere between 80 and 100. When Berklee took over, the very first purchase that was made was two ME-Us and forty ME-1 Mixers.’
The units are distributed between four large-format studios and one production room, as well as a live performance space. In order to interface with the various vintage analogue mixers used in Power Station, intermediate matrix processors handle the analogue-to-digital conversion. A Focusrite interface then manages sample rate conversion before hitting an Allen & Heath ME-U distribution hub with a Dante module installed. The ME-U features ten PoE outputs that can both power and feed audio to the individual ME mixers.
As a top-tier full-featured media production facility, the updated Power Station at Berklee NYC offers diverse media services, including high-end video capture, professional lighting, 360 cinematic VR, spatial audio, broadcast and live streaming. ‘It’s an interesting hybrid,’ says Power Station Studio Technician/Audio Engineer, Mark Rucci, ‘It’s a fully commercial studio, which has an academic side to it as well.’
Since Power Station studios often need more than ten monitor feeds, each ME-U feeds a large 48-port PoE switch to multiple wall outputs in the studio live rooms. The engineers can then use any of those connection points to connect the performers’ ME-1 mixers. Rucci recalls using between 60 and 70 ME-1 mixers simultaneously during one particularly large session. ‘We could theoretically use more, but it would get a bit crowded in the studio.’
When many ME-1s are in use, mixer configurations are prepared in advance using a unit in the control room, then transfers it to a USB drive for convenient copying to the various mixers that will be in use for the session.
Rucci notes that the last key on each ME-1 is typically reserved for talkback: ‘We actually set it as a group of three inputs – since the actual control room talkback may be combined with a producer or conductor who needs to communicate with the performer from a remote location over the internet.’
Performers can adjust the overall talkback level, or the level of the individual mics within the talkback group. ‘We also made a More Me group for our standard template – Button 8 is a group with Channel 8 and 25-40. This way just about every singer or horn player, has their own personal level. We just adjust which channel is turned up on the group at each mixer, and it makes things so easy. Everyone can get a truly personalized mix, with themselves as the featured sound.’
A studio assistant trains the performers on the ME-1 before each session. ‘It’s quite intuitive – you press the key, it lights up, and you use the encoder to adjust the level of each channel,’ Rucci notes. ‘The ME-1’s have also been a blessing when we are tying multiple studios together for larger groups and cast albums, just one cable and the other room has the same monitor feeds.’
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