DiGiCo and Waves in the mix at Hudson Hall
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Abandoned for decades, the building was saved when local citizens came together in 1992 to establish a cultural centre there to serve its diverse community.
In 2017, Hudson Hall completed a $9.5m restoration of its performance hall to support a thriving creative economy in the town of, and the region around, Hudson, New York. The next step in Hudson Hall’s journey has now been taken, with the installation of a DiGiCo S21 console used to mix the venue’s front-of-house sound, monitors, and the streaming of shows online.
Keith Rivers, Hudson Hall’s house audio engineer, also wears many hats. In addition to acting as the venue’s front-of-house and monitor mixer, he’s also responsible for the audio mix of Hudson Hall’s online streamcasts. Furthermore, Rivers is the account manager for the Commercial Sales Group at Audio Video Corporation, the Albany, NY-based AV systems integrator that sold and installed the S21 along with a DiGiCo D2-Rack, connected over a Cat 5 cable, and an integrated Waves SuperRack SoundGrid.
“We’re a 400-seat, non-profit venue, but we also serve a very robust arts community and we regularly host shows by Grammy Award-winning music artists,” says Rivers, noting the Hudson Jazz Festival, which was performing there at the moment. “So we have to be able to serve a wide array of artists and audience, from musicians like Natalie Merchant, The National, and Jazzmeia Horn to local community groups such as Harmony Project Hudson and the Camphill Hudson Players. The S21 lets me do all of that, and do it well.”
Rivers cites the S21’s 48 channels that let the venue host even large music groups onstage, and the fact that he can operate all of it at 96 kHz, assuring visiting artists of spectacular sound quality. Also, the S21’s matrixing capabilities let him use it like multiple consoles, creating mixes for both the house and the online audience, tuned precisely for each purpose.
There are five matrix zones - main PA, FOH, nearfield speakers, camera feed, and overflow areas - that can all be processed individually via various Waves components and DiGiCo processing. “I have what I call ‘plug-in awesomeness’ running on all eight stereo subgroups before the master/main mix,” says Rivers. “But I rely on all DiGiCo onboard channel-strip processing and DiGiTube emulation at the input stage.”
