Martin Audio and Focusrite deck out the Battle of the Bands
The Battle of the Bands (BOTB) contest for young aspiring musicians based in the United Kingdom used two pro audio manufacturers in Martin Audio and Focusrite to broadcast the sound. The 12 bands used a premier touring PA and Dante backbone throughout the concert.
The setup was designed to mimic that of a professional set and the 12 finalists were using a Martin Audio system that was used for the Foo Fighters Sonic Highway tour.
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Martin Audio product support engineer Ben Tucker specified the equipment and piloted the house mix on a DiGiCo SD12-96 while his colleague Nigel Meddemmen was down in monitor world, aboard a DiGiCo SD11.
This gave the bands a combination of optomised line arrays WPN system with four boxes groundstacked and run in optimum one-box resolution. These were mounted on a universal bracket, above two SXC118 subwoofers per-side.
Ben sent a left or right signal from the mixing console into both amplifiers which sums the inputs for the subs, so they were running in mono.
Alongside this, a single CDD-LIVE 8 at FOH let Ben communicate with Nigel on stage, while he used his LE1200 listen wedge as foldback for FOH. In total there were six LE1200 floor monitors on stage for the band members—three mixes across the front, with a paired centre mix. There were also two ‘floating’ upstage LE1200s that were flexible when required and a pair of LE200 wedges for the drummer.
Focusrite used three RedNet MP8R, delivering 24 channels of high-quality and remote controlled preamps at stage with integrated A-D converting to Dante which provided 64 channels of MADI>Dante>MADI conversion to integrate the two DiGiCo consoles among others.
Dante was also used to facilitate comms back and forth.
“Both Nigel and I have used DiGiCo extensively and the integration into the Focusrite Dante network was easy, as we used RedNet D64R MADI-Dante converters for both consoles; and of course our speakers sit nicely on the Dante network as well,” Ben says.
“Being able to come out of the consoles straight into a MADI converter to get them onto a Dante network suited us down to the ground. The Red 8Pre in our drive rack was used for Smaart measurements and playback, and clocking wasn’t an issue at all which is normally the weak link in fully digital systems.
“So overall I was extremely satisfied with the outcome of the entire system. We wanted to give the aspiring young musicians a taste of a professional PA setup from front-to-back, which I think we achieved really well.”
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