The 200th birthday celebration of Wagner and Verdi was marked by the recent Vienna Philharmonic Summer Night Concert at the spectacular Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. As well as attracting a large audience, the event was recorded for DVD release and broadcast on television by Teldex Studio Berlin.
While it was essential that the recording set-up was failsafe, bringing a complete back-up system was a bulky option. The Teldex team had planned to record using Merging Technologies’ Pyramix with the Horus Networked Audio Converter, but advances in laptop technology invited them to consider their options.
They worked out that a MacBook Pro with a Thunderbolt connection to a Sonnet Echo Express PCIe Expansion Chassis might allow them to run Pyramix MassCore with Horus in a more portable configuration. It seemed to work in tests at the studio and the Ravenna stream to the MacBook was free of glitches if the main PC was rebooted, so the decision was made to use this as the back-up recorder on the Summer Night Concert.
This was not a trivial undertaking as there were 91 tracks to record, with 64 front of house and the remainder coming from the suspended microphones. As predicted, no problems were encountered and the recording was faultless. So impressed was René Möller from Teldex that took on another important recording in the same way.
Wirh Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra giving a performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem in prospect, Teldex was asked to supplement the Berlin Philharmonic’s existing equipment.
The recording needed to be in 96kHz/48-bit resolution with 58 tracks to be recorded but, in this case, the microphones feed into the hall’s Stagetec Aurus console with Nexus router. This was no problem for the Horus, with both Madi and AES/EBU connections available. Once again, the combination worked flawlessly.
‘It is always gratifying when a theory works in practice,’ Möller says. ‘Using a PC-based program on Mac hardware doesn’t always allow the normal settings to be made but this works like a dream. This is a real bonus for us and a real boost for Merging. To be able to use MassCore on a laptop is a real game-changer.’
More: www.merging.com
