sunrat Posted November 30, 2012 Share Posted November 30, 2012 The club I work at has finally crawled out of the primeval analog ooze of a 20-year old (admittedly excellent) Yamaha PM4000 console. See here for a picture of old faithful. On Tuesday we took delivery of two Digico SD10 consoles, one for front-of-house and one for monitors. They cost over $80,000 each and are state of art and one of the best brands available. We are a crew of 4 sound engineers who work rosters to be House Tech each night for over 300 shows each year. None of us had experience with this desk and not much experience with digital consoles at all. We got the desks finally installed by 1am Wednesday morning and just checked if they worked before leaving for a short sleep; by 2pm we needed them ready for a soundcheck by The Church, one of Australia's premier bands and one of my favourites. It is testament to their good design and our crew's determination that they were set up in time and have performed flawlessly for 3 shows now, all with zero help from anyone with relevant knowledge or experience! I was asked less than 2 weeks ago to become the resident expert and consultant for the first few shows. I'm happy to say I managed to learn enough very quickly to pull it off, and actually amazed myself and the others to boot. They look like this (click to enbiggen): Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ross549 Posted November 30, 2012 Share Posted November 30, 2012 I was finally able to upgrade from an excellent Allen & Heath GL2400 board at church to a Presonus StudioLive 24.4.2. We love it too. Having everything built in has been a huge timesaver, and the firewire multitrack has been quite handy. Adam Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ross549 Posted December 5, 2012 Share Posted December 5, 2012 I'd be shocked if those boards had amplifiers built in...... If you can afford these digital boards, than in all likelihood you can afford amplifiers..... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted December 5, 2012 Author Share Posted December 5, 2012 There is a rack of amps, about 10,000 watts, next to the stage to power the speakers. They are fed from a stereo output via a 4-way crossover. The input signal is a single MADI cable from a 48 channel A/D converter on the stage. The console is pretty amazing, with dynamics control on each channel, 24 1/3-octave graphics equalizers and a multitude of digital effects internally. Even with all this, I was still amazed the other night when the Omar Rodriguez Lopez Group played. Their sound engineer Matt, who also does ZZ Top, brought in a 20 channel Line6 StageScape mixer with wi-fi adapter, hooked up 2 channels from that to our console, and did the entire mix from an iPad! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ross549 Posted December 5, 2012 Share Posted December 5, 2012 Yep, we have ipad mixing on the Presonus too.... I love it! Adam Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted December 10, 2012 Author Share Posted December 10, 2012 ten ~thousand~ watts! - how do you keep that cool? - what is the input voltage? 120vac? 240? 10,000 watts is just the front-of house speakers. They get quite warm but have internal fans plus one on the rack (Crest CA12 amps, made in Meridian, MS). There are also 4 Camco Vortex 6 amps for monitors that can output 3000 watts per side, but they barely get warm as they don't get pushed near their limit. They all sit under the monitor console so it can get quite toasty for the operator; I usually put a large portable fan next to me on warmer days. Power is 240VAC, drawn from a 30 amp-per-phase 3-phase source. There are two other 3-phase circuits for lighting and another two for our second stage. It's a big setup with a room capacity of 850 people. We do over 300 shows per year with many big local and international artists. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ross549 Posted December 11, 2012 Share Posted December 11, 2012 Yeah, we don't get anywhere near that at he church. I can seat about 135 in the main sanctuary, and I don't even know how much power our amps are capable of. They were all donated and used at the time. All I know is that the amp that powers the subwoofers barely run above 5% input.... Adam Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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