The Club House live music tent at Devon’s Somersault Festival recently put Roland’s Ohrca M-5000 Live Digital Mixing Console at FOH, where it was also showcased to engineers working at the festival.
The opportunity came from a collaboration with Darryn de la Soul, founder of the audio engineers’ network and support service Soulsound. Soulsound sound engineer Jose Ortega (Quincy Jones Productions, Imogen Heap) was at the helm of the M-5000 for the majority of the performances. ‘The M-5000 was quick to understand and has really good features that made my life easy,’ he reports.
Roland Product Manager Nico Suarez was also on-hand to help with set-up and support the engineers for the three-day event. Following the success of Somersault, de la Soul also used the M-5000 in a similar set-up for the Wilderness Festival.
‘The best features of this console are the 96kHz processing, the wonderfully configurable architecture, the easy-to-navigate control surface with features like Isolation and Anchors and the numerous user-assignable faders, knobs and buttons – which give a really intimate level of control over key channels and parameters,’ de la Soul says. ‘The really handy Isolation button allows the fader banks to be separated, so you can have two people working on the same desk, and Anchors are also a superb feature for usability and quick finding of important channels without scrolling through dozens of channels or flipping through layers. We had an absolute blast with it, and it sounded simply fantastic.’
The M-5000 was connecting using REAC (Roland Ethernet Audio Communication) via Cat 5e cable at 96kHz to a Roland S-4000S I/O box on the stage. The M-5000 has two REAC ports allowing extra I/O boxes to be added and a third REAC port which can be used for connection to monitors, recording to a PC or standalone recorder such as the R-1000 or to the Roland M-48 personal monitoring system.
The festival also provided the setting for a tutorial video showing the M-5000 set-up and features, to be used as a resource on the Soulsound website. ‘Showing great technology at work is part of our commitment to educating and inspiring our audio engineers,’ de la Soul says. ‘The M-5000 at Somersault was a perfect example of what can be achieved within a relatively simple set-up with the right product.’
