USA - When FOH engineer Chris Leonard took up his latest role, piloting the sound for country star Jason Aldean, he wasted no time in streamlining his FOH setup. “I took up the position in February, spent March prepping and hit the festival scene in April; so it needed to be a fast transition,” he said.
One of his concerns was lack of familiarity with the existing SSL L550 Plus FOH console. “While it is an amazing desk, I didn’t want to try and learn a new console on a gig of this size.” Instead, he turned to his trusty DiGiCo Quantum 338. His other concern was the need for a reduced footprint, noting there had been no available room in the I/O rack to put both a split and two SD racks. “All of the sub snakes hit that rack and routed straight to the SSL [ML32:32] I/O boxes,” he said.
Chris Leonard looked at various options for integrating the 96 channels of MADI into his system. He was already familiar with the Optocore topology: “I had used Optocore Festival Boxes multiple times with great success – and with DiGiCo I’ve used the Optocore loop for much of the last decade too.
“I’ve also had good experiences before with the DD4R MR-FX [MADI interface], integrating track rigs to the loop, and with them being only 1RU each, we could fit them into the existing I/O rack without having to modify it much, thereby saving time and space.”
This time he opted for a pair of Optocore M8-BNC coaxial MADI switches, which he strategically located in monitor world (where monitor engineer Evan Richner resides). This enables fibre to be run back to FOH where it interconnects with his Q338 at FOH, and into the M8s, which connect to the SSL I/O – handling three streams of 32-channel MADI at 96k.
Leonard explained the rationale. “Since the M8s are only 1RU each we were able to fit them in our existing monitor I/O rack. In fact, Evan has managed to fit all our RF, SSL I/O and ancillaries into a double wide 30RU rack. This has allowed him to both keep his footprint small and also save time during load in/load out. It also saved a lot of extra cabling each day and an entire other rack. All he has to do each day is just patch our HMA fibre into the back of the rack for FOH, and that’s it.”
A Dante network runs between monitor console, PA drive rack, the d&b DS10s (for Dante drive to the amp racks) and the Q338 at FOH. When the audio infrastructure was clocked to the Dante network, ensuring solid word clock sync between the SSL I/O and the Optocore network was proving troublesome, and a challenge to lock down. “But once we dropped in the M8s they locked right in and haven’t given us any issues. I simply take word clock via Dante from the drive rack at FOH and push that to the M8s over the Optocore loop.”
This unusual deployment has been a great solution, he says. “Our FOH snake can stay as HMA fibre, instead of having to run a bunch of BNC MADI lines.”
Furthermore, an identical duplicated rig for upcoming ‘B’ rig scenarios uses a second pair of M8s, creating a setup that will carry them through the foreseeable future.
In summary, Chris Leonard says: “Regardless of any changes – even to our entire infrastructure – the M8s can handle it. I can still come up with multiple uses for the M8s – even the ability to use them as matrix mixers, separate from the Optocore loop, opens up a world of potential possibilities.”
Their provider is Nashville-based Spectrum Sound, long supporters of the Aldean organisation. “Bobby George, our account rep, was also instrumental in making this happen,” says Leonard. Audio crew chief was Loren Zimmer and extra support was provided by Brandon Coons at Optocore NA.
