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 GEARED’s resident motorcycle diarist and sound engineer – WILLY T – ogles the pristine digital sound system at Brisbane’s sweetest new venue – THE HI-FI in West End.
When new venue operators arrive in town from interstate there are two ways to spread the word to get bums-on-seats. One is via the punters – where the venue crew puts on hot bands in a central location, staffed by groovers to pump up a great vibe. The other alternative is appeal to the musos and touring road crew by ensuring that touring acts have an easy bump-in and have access to top-of-the-range audio gear to pull a great live mix. Well, the operators of Melbourne’s Swanson St Hi-Fi Bar look to do both – having settled into a great venue full of top flight audio gear.
The Hi-Fi’s purpose built venue at 125 Boundary Street, West End has a state of the art main room with mezzanine level giving great sight lines for 1200 punters; as well as seven different levels to watch the band!
The in-house PA System is centred around a Digidesign VENUE D-Show Profile Mix Rack System for front-of-house mixing, a Yamaha M7CL for Foldback Duties, Italian designed Outline Line Array speakers and subs, with Wayloud and JBL monitors powered by Quest amps. The microphone kit has all the usual Shure mic suspects and complemented by Whirlwind DI boxes.
The D-Show Profile Mix Rack System is a two box design that comprises a control surface – the mixing desk – as well as the all-in-one, 11-space rack-mounted Mix Rack In/Out components and mix ‘engine’. The mixing desk is referred to as a control surface as the desk itself does not pass any audio! All audio conversions and DSP (Digital Signal Processing) occurs ‘off site’ from the mixing desk, at the Mix Rack. The mixing desk just operates as a router and controller of the Mix Rack’s functions. The ‘one box’ Profile system combines with a wee bit of old school by running a copper analogue multicore from the stage to the Mix Rack system, where all the analogue-to-digital conversion takes place.
Digital audio has long been the gear of choice for high-end acts and hire companies. At all the big gigs you’ll see the industry leaders like Digidesign, Yamaha and DiGiCo. But why? It’s mostly to do with space, weight and convenience. Space and weight are a factor when touring PA systems as everything must fit in trucks and not be overloaded. Weight is also a factor when organising road crews. As an example, at this year’s Big Day Out they operated two Profile Systems for the Main Stage front-of-House mixing duties, rather than the usual Midas XL4s. This was a two-man set-up by the dudes from Jands rather than those two plus four more roadies from All Access Crewing to man-handle the heavy analogue Midas desk into place!
Space is also a telling factor in venues and resident shows. Think of long running theatre shows like the recent Phantom Of The Opera at QPAC; by having a smaller footprint the desk takes up fewer seats. If we look at a six month season for the play with tickets that were not cheap, the saved and then sold spaces can add up to serious dollars! But, there’s more! All the best digi-desks come with on-board FX plug-ins and dynamics processors like Graphic Equalisers, Gates and Compressors, saving the extra space of rack mounted hardware.
The other factor to consider is the sheer convenience of being able to store all our desk set-up and mix parameters on a memory stick. This way engineers can walk into the venue with a USB stick in their pocket, patch it in and voila! All the settings from last night’s gig!
Digidesign, being the brains behind ProTools – the most successful recording system on the planet – have seamlessly integrated their recording systems so it is simple to record a gig and then use it the next day as a virtual sound check. We can do all the tweaking of the show and practice our mixing chops offline, with no more waiting around for musos to turn up! How good is that?
With a happening venue and great gear there is no excuse for any band or engineer not to sound full-on. All I can say is rock-on, Hi-Fi!
THE HI-FI opens with THE DRONES on Wednesday Apr 29, with support from Qui and Witch Hats. Entry is free by competition, which you can find at www.thehifi.com.au/competitions/34/. For more information about Digidesign audio gear check out www.digidesign.com.
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