Nordic's chief engineer and head of sound, Jens Elsborg, invested in the first five units late last year specifically to handle the broadcast splits for the Junior Eurovision Song contest hosted in Copenhagen in November. He was so impressed with the sonic quality and ease of use of the DN1248 Plus that he opted to take another five pieces in order to handle the demands of the gruelling summer festival season. It also gives him the capacity to handle even larger broadcast events.
"We used to buy our splitters from another manufacturer, but the problem was that they just didn't have the capacity to accept high input levels without distorting or clipping," explained Elsborg. "For example, signal from, say, a high-hat or a condenser mic just used to send them off the scale. We would then have to reduce the gain by as much as 10dB so that the split could handle the signal safely, but of course, in a festival situation when the next monitor guy comes and plugs his gear in, all the levels are f**ked! It's very frustrating. You end up spending your entire day adjusting and readjusting the settings. However, with the KT device, you can just plug it in and walk away. It has sufficient headroom to handle pretty much anything we throw at it up to +21dBu without clipping or distorting, and of course it sounds great. It offers us a very safe and easy solution for festival situations where it is required to handle a number of different set-ups with very little changeover time. It's been a real godsend for us!"
Ascon's Ib Sigismund concurs. "The DN1248 Plus is definitely becoming the industry-standard splitter for both live and broadcast applications. The inclusion of Midas preamps means that sonically it's just unbeatable, and of course you get all that extra headroom as well. Consequently, it's hard for other splitters to compete on the same level, which suits us just fine!"
A profile of Nordic Rentals appeared in the March 2004 issue of Lighting&Sound International magazine.
(Lee Baldock)
