With bands ranging from Oasis, Kasabian, Franz Ferdinand and Snow Patrol at the commercial end to acoustic performers like Newton Faulkner, quirky performance artists with wide dynamic ranges (like Bat for Lashes' Natasha Khan), leavened with some good old fashioned hard house and R&B it was important that the event's experienced sound engineers, Dave Roden at FOH (here deployed as system tech) and Will King down at the stage had digital mixing environments on which incoming engineers could hit the ground running.
Last year, when the event was held at Koko, iTunes production manager Stuart Turvill took advantage of a pair of Soundcraft Vi6's, with the Studer Vistonics II interface, and it proved so popular he saw no reason to break from that tradition.
A 64-input Vi6 (with AES-EBU cards) was one of two digital surfaces offered at front-of-house, enabling incoming productions to simply plug in their show files, while down at the stage the compact surface was configured 64-in/35-out.
"You don't get a lot of resistance from engineers when they see the Vi6," says Turvill, adding that he has good reason to thank Soundcraft's sister brand, BSS Audio, for the 144 channels of [MSR-604 II] splitters that are being used. "I can't speak highly enough about the support we've had from Sound Technology."
(Jim Evans)
