Vives' Front of House engineer Rob 'Cubby' Colby is a keen DiGiCo user and C Villa proprietor Mauricio Vilar Martinez felt the SD8 would be the ideal product for the company.
"The audio quality, dynamics and frequency response are all excellent and I really like being able to connect the remote snake via MADI," says Martinez. "When it came off the plane from the UK, we started using it right away, without even reading the manual. It worked really well from the start."
One of the more challenging events the SD8 has already been used on is at the Festival of Classic Music, held annually in Cartagena, in the north of the country. This was the fourth year that C Villa had worked on the festival, with Martinez deploying the console on an outdoor concert by the City of London Symphony Orchestra, where expectations were high but soundcheck time minimal.
"The audience was approximately 700 strong and every single one of them wanted to hear CD quality sound, despite us having very little soundcheck time," says Martinez. "With a rock band where you have three guys on drums, bass and keyboards, people spend two or more hours soundchecking. With a 60-piece orchestra, we get five or 10 minutes if we're lucky."
Fifty inputs from the orchestra microphones, plus an MC, were mixed on the SD8 and output to an Adamson Y10 line array system using XTA processing.
"The biggest challenge was mixing 50 channels of very sensitive microphones, just one block away from the beach. There was a lot of breeze, which can end up bleeding through the mics," says Martinez. "So we had to use a lot of high-pass filtering."
(Jim Evans)
