Two Studer Vista 9 digital consoles have been specifically installed for the programme at the Warner Bros Studio Facilities' Stage 15, in Burbank, California. Studer Vista 9 consoles are used in both the Music Mix control room and in the Production Audio mix control room, both of which were designed and equipped by Sound Design Corporation.
"Conan's shows are a huge mix of talk, stand-up, sketch comedy, remote locations and live music, and they'll go from one to the other in a heartbeat," observes Paul Sandweiss, president of Sound Design Corporation, and sound designer for Conan, as well as O'Brien's stint as host of The Tonight Show Featuring Conan O'Brien. "The show is so fast-paced that, unlike most late-night talk shows, in addition to main production mixer Mike Stock and music mixer Brian Lodato, we also have a dedicated sound effects mixer, Rob Ohlandt. The consoles for this show have to be able to keep up.
"We were totally impressed with the performance of the Vista 8, and the Vista 9 brings even more features and functionality to this show. Conanis a pretty packed show in terms of how many I/Os we need to cover dialogue, sound effects and music, and the Vista 9 has the capability to share console cores, meaning that we get 96 channels of digital cross-connectivity without giving up any of the I/O in either console. We created a common MADI stream between the two consoles so we can have two hard drive recorders running all the time backing each other up. It's true redundancy--the record paths go to and from both consoles, it's great to have that kind of backup protection. We can do any fixes from either room."
(Jim Evans)
