Charting over a century of turbulent English history, this ambitious project reached its climax in the spring of 2008 in London's Roundhouse venue. One of the RSC's own DiGiCo D5T consoles ensured that the sound for this complex series of productions was delivered flawlessly.
With a sound design by Andrea J Cox and operated by Sarah Hollyman and Ed Borgnis, the audio system was necessarily intricate to accommodate regular performances of eight different plays in the same venue - sometimes with three different performances running back-to-back in a single day.
However, the D5T's internal matrix and snapshots have ensured that the system runs extremely smoothly, as Ed Borgnis explains.
"As you'd expect, it's very much a theatrical system. It's basically a third band mics, a third effected radio mics and a third playback/ sound effects, run from an Akai sampler, all fed to the D5T via a MADI multicore.
"There are up to six channels of radio mics being used for the actors at any one time, although the mics themselves do get swapped between the performers. In addition to that there are 25-30 mics in the band gallery. This is because, even though it's only a five-piece band, they play a lot of different instruments, especially percussion. There are a lot of interesting sounds - like cymbals being played with violin bows - going on up there, plus instruments I'd never come across before.
"There are also up to 16 channels of playback from the Akai sampler at any one time. It's not the most modern way to do it, but the sound designers like samplers and, most importantly, they seem very reliable."
(Jim Evans)
