 The burgeoning amount of live classical music now offered by stately homes recently gave XTA a chance to display the possibilities offered by remote control of its SiDD processors.
Sound engineer Richard Waghorn is a regular user of SiDDs and seized the opportunity to explore the units' remote control facilities when the 'other' Hampton Court - a stately home near Leominster - staged an evening of classical music with a string quartet.
The compact FOH system consisted of two Funktion One Resolution 2 loudspeakers, four close mics and an ambient stereo mic, mixed via an Allen & Heath MixWizard console, which had three SiDD units placed across its inputs. The MixWizard and SiDDs were situated in a camper van, parked behind the tent used to house the string quartet.
Waghorn controlled the show from two laptop computers with wireless modems running PC Anywhere software. This allowed the AudioCore control software for the SiDDs to be accessed from the laptops and the FOH engineer to literally sit in the audience to control the entire sound system.
XTA's Phil Key notes how the novel way of mixing this production came about: "Because it was a string quartet, Richard and Hampton Court obviously wanted to make the audio production as discreet as possible. I'd done some research into fast radio links and thought we could combine that aim with Richard's use of the SiDDs.
"We thought 'It's not a huge gig. Let's try it and see what happens, we'll see how flexible it is.' The whole thing was very experimental, but it worked extremely well."
Richard Waghorn concurs, saying: "The SiDD unit is pretty special. I've been using it 'manually' all year and it was a good opportunity to look at the computer control facilities. It was fantastic to be able to sit in the audience and control the entire system from the laptop, with no multicore or mains. The whole system worked incredibly well."
The only problem Waghorn encountered was the battery going flat on one of the laptops. "But that was fine," he says. "Because if the computer shuts down, the other end stays exactly as it is until you change the battery and re-boot the laptop."
Such was the event's success that wireless control of SiDD processors is likely to become a far more common occurrence, along with the remote control facilities for the DP226 loudspeaker management system already in use on major shows around the world, such as the current AC/DC tour of European festivals.
"I'm sure we'll expand on it. We'd certainly like to try it on a bigger scale," says Phil Key. "The technlogy is all there to do it, it's fast and it's now reliable. It's just gaining people's acceptance of it."
|
|
|
|
|
