The live-sound mix console business is in play. The number of new desks is on the rise, and digital technology is leveling the landscape for deals. Consider the DiGiCo SD series consoles used at the world’s biggest televised audio party, the Grammy Awards, held Feb. 12 in Staples Center. The crew used a 256-input DiGiCo SD7 console at FOH and two 96-input DiGiCo SD10s at monitors, with a third 96-channel SD10 used for the production mix. These replaced Yamaha PM1D consoles, which had been used on the show for the last nine years.
A “Massive” Shift
It was a “massive” shift, according to Mikael Stewart, vice president for live events at ATK Audiotek, which has been the SR provider for the Grammy show for 22 of the last 27 years. “To go from one type of platform that we were all very familiar with to one that’s all digital and where all the mic pre’s are controlled by one person is a pretty deep step,” he says.
The Grammy live show is both complex and important to the music industry. Along with a huge spike in television viewers — over 39 million, nearly 50 percent more than the previous year (many of whom likely tuned in to watch the tribute to Whitney Houston), more than 16,000 people, including many VIPs who know a thing or two about sound quality, heard the show live.
The desire to stay with a proven platform is understandable, so it wouldn’t have been a shock if ATK Audiotek opted to stick with Yamaha for one more year, even though the company had announced that it would be discontinuing the production of the PM1D in 2011 due to lack of availability of some components.
But as the needs of live event sound continue to expand, and more manufacturers vie to fill those needs, it’s likely that the Grammy crew won’t be the only ones looking at different console options this year.
Recognizing a Need
Jack Kelly, president of Group One Ltd, the U.S. distributor for DiGiCo, says he had approached ATK two years earlier about making a change, emphasizing the SD7’s large I/O capacity, operational flexibility and digital interoperability, particularly with the Optocore network system.
Stewart recalls that he wasn’t impressed at the time. “It wasn’t ready yet,” he says, citing reports of crashes and software glitches. “Plus, the SD7 was bigger than we need for 90 percent of the shows we do, so we couldn’t justify spending that kind of money on it.”
Kelly says DiGiCo listened. “When you’re the distributor for a brand, what you really have to do is set up a line of communication between the manufacturer and the users, and that’s what we did,” he says. Kelly created a conduit for the concerns voiced by Stewart and other SR providers back to DiGiCo’s U.K. base, where some of those comments were turned into designs and applied, in the process creating the SD10, a smaller, more affordable desk but one that included a lot of the operational aspects of the larger, more expensive SD7. This included hiring a co-founder of DiGiCo, Taidus Vallandi, to assure a high-level link for U.S. users.
The focus, Kelly says, was on making the console more reliable while keeping complex features such as gain sharing integrated to its operation, as well as improving the mixer’s experience with the board. “We worked hard over the course of a year revising the way the console operates to accommodate what we were hearing,” he says, especially ATK, which Kelly says is one of only a handful of SR providers who work successfully in the market for large, high-profile events such as nationally televised awards programs. “That market has very specialized requirements, and if you can meet them, you’re going a long way to gaining their confidence.”
That degree of response paid off. By 2011, Kelly was able to point to high-level tours using DiGiCo consoles, including some who would be featured performers on this year’s Grammy Awards show — Bruce Springsteen, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Bon Iver and Alicia Keys.
Stewart was impressed with the changes, and the use of the DiGiCo consoles for this year’s Grammys was green-lighted. (For more on the challenge of mixing the Grammy Awards live show, and how the new consoles were integrated in the production’s complex workflow, see “Grammy Live,” FOH, March 2012, page 22). “The real benchmark we needed to hit was stability,” he says. “We needed to be able to achieve that same level of stability that we had with the PM1D.” (ATK still has over 20 PM1D and PM5D consoles in their inventory, and the PM5D continues to be supported by the manufacturer.)
Stewart says there weren’t a lot of other contenders to replace the PM1D at the Grammy Awards in the last two years. The closest competitors were the Studer Vista and Avid VENUE. Stewart likes the Studer, but felt that it was still a broadcast console at its core and not appropriate for the Grammy’s live-sound requirements. The VENUE, however sophisticated, was deemed too small for the show.
Stewart agrees that the market has opened up considerably in the last year, with more choices coming down the road. “There’s more possibilities to pick from now than ever before,” he says.
The Digital Dynamic
The live-sound console market will likely follow the dynamic emerging in the broadcast audio market, where the dominant Calrec brand has been finding more competition from companies like DiGiCo, Studer, Stage Tec and Lawo, thanks to digital technology — generally in the form of multi-layered work surfaces — putting more vendors on a perceptually even footing.
Live sound has always had a deeper pool of sources to choose from, but it’s just going to get deeper. Given how reluctant high-end users are to change platforms for complex recurring projects like awards shows, DiGiCo likely has a secure seat at the Grammys for some time to come. But a decade-long run like the PM1D had there may be harder than ever to achieve in a rapidly-changing digital market.
