But Sean had an additional requirement from his desk. "I'm teching for myself, as well as mixing monitors," he explains. "I needed a small footprint without compromising audio quality, but I needed something that was quick and easy to set up and breakdown each day."
"My main priority is also audio quality," adds Jonathan. " I knew I would get that with the SD9 (and with any DiGiCo!). The desk sounds great right from the in, the pre-amps are crystal clean, and the EQ sounds fantastic; it actually allows you to be creative rather than just being corrective."
"The SD9 has two 12 fader banks, which makes everything accessible," Sean continues. "I also needed a desk with two PFL busses, as I am running both a Sennheiser G2 in ear system and wedges simultaneously - I love the easy way you can route channels and outputs to wherever you need them; DiGiCo desks are very versatile and there aren't really any limits to what you can route where, and the sound quality is incredible.
"DiGiCo is very well regarded in the industry for a good reason. The preamps sound really good; you plug in the mic 'one-two, one-two, check' and the sound is already good. The four band EQ is also really responsive; no matter how much you have to carve out from the signal, it always sounds great, it has real body and live-ness to it that's hard to describe."
Jonathan's other priority is how the desk works as a creative tool. "I believe mixing is a combination of technical knowledge and creativity," he says. "With the SD9 I can put any inputs in any place I need, which makes mixing a joy and allows me to be artistic. The two banks of 12 faders works really well for FOH. I set one bank to be my input channels, and the other bank to DCA's, Groups, FX sends, and Matrix's etc.
"This was incredibly easy to navigate and gave me full control of the band at all times. As I was taking the desk in the trailer along with all our backline (which is a lot!), the size of the SD9 was key. The amount of channels you get for the size is excellent, this also kept the tour manager happy as it fits in nice and easy."
Sean is running 42 inputs, six stereo in ears, one mono in ears, three wedge mixes and, on some days, two side fills, whilst Jonathan has 34 inputs, plus the electric guitars running through a stereo group.
"I've then got eight Matrix outputs set up (input from the L+R mix). The PA and venues were very different each night on this tour, so I needed total flexibility when it came to output distribution."
(Jim Evans)
