Osibisa, founded in London by four African and three Caribbean musicians, went on to become one of the first widely popular African bands. Performing live at the Salisbury Arts Centre in celebration of their 40th anniversary, these seasoned musicians found themselves in the midst of a most modern PA system; full front-of-house and monitor control using the RSS M-400 V-Mixer digital consoles, with dedicated digital multicores and stageboxes, connected to a show recording system via Roland's proprietary EtherNet protocol REAC.
Paul Nicholson was mixing the show on a Tannoy VQ PA system provided by his rental company Midas Pro Sound. Although a dealer for the RSS digital products, this was the first opportunity he'd had to use M-400s at both front-of-house and for the monitor mix.
"Speaking as an engineer, I love the simplicity of this system, it is streets ahead of its rivals. The products are well-built and you can tell that the system has been thought through by its designers. With excellent head amps, gates and compressors, the M-400 sounds very good, very clean and dynamic."
Midas Pro Sound is also an official dealer for the RSG range of digital products, including the M-400 V-Mixing System. "As a rental company owner, I'm knocked out by the price, which represents outstanding value for money in comparison to any other digital console in this sector of the market," continues Nicholson.
In Salisbury, the audio set-up for Osibisa used two M-400 V-Mixer digital mixing consoles, one for FOH and one at stageside, handling an eight-way mix on L-Acoustics HiQ wedge monitors. Two S-1608 Digital Snake stage boxes each with 16 inputs and eight outputs, and one S-0816 I/O Snake unit with eight inputs and 16 outputs, were used to deliver all the mic and line feeds to the two mixing consoles.
A S-4000SP REAC splitter box was used to take 40 separate channels of digital audio straight from the stage boxes to record as separate tracks on the REAC-ready SONAR, a PC-based digital multitrack being operated by RSS technical guru Martin Thomas. Each track arrived at the Sonar PC pre everything - eq, compression, fx, etc - except gain. This meant that even though the M-400 was mixing the show at front-of-house with reverbs, delays, EQ and compression on various instruments, the signals that were being recorded on the Sonar were 'clean' and ready for post-production later if required. Osibisa musicians were able to hear a replay from the multi-track straight after the performance.
(Jim Evans)
