UK - South London-based production house Subfrantic has acquired two new DiGiCo consoles - a Quantum 225 and Quantum Pulse 338 with 32 Bit SD Racks.
Founded in 1993, Subfrantic supplies high end solutions to many different situations. Its long client list includes houses of worship, live events, festivals, touring, conferences, and even carnival floats for the Notting Hill Carnival.
Subfrantic Studios, developed post-pandemic in 2021, is the company’s rehearsal and recording facility which shares a warehouse and rental inventory with the production side of the business. The studios are a set of spaces for touring musicians and technicians, but also support upcoming artists and engineers. The building has been designed around the needs of the whole team, providing facilities for work and wellbeing which are a real bonus for touring engineers and artists.
Managing director Steve Davies explains how the new DiGiCo purchases will further support their expansion.
“We’ve been waiting for a good opportunity to get back into DiGiCo since selling our SD8 a few years ago and the Quantum series felt like the right moment for us,” he says. “DiGiCo is a market leading console for live acts, and where we’ve previously lost out on touring artists coming to our studios because we weren’t able to offer them one, now that hole is plugged.”
DiGiCo consoles are the mixing desk of choice for many live engineers due to their flexibility and capability to withstand the pressures of nightly touring. For Subfrantic, the attraction to DiGiCo was not just because of requests from engineers and artists, but also the ability to use the consoles across a range of different performance settings.
“DiGiCo is a professional standard that people want and expect to see,” Davies says. “Engineers like the familiarity across the range and the unique features they offer, especially the new Nodal Processing found in Quantum. I’m looking forward to getting to know these better from behind the consoles, including KLANG integration and the Pulse update which we are rolling out over the next few weeks.”
The consoles are already demonstrating how useful they can be, with Davies confirming that both the Quantum 225 and 338 will be heading out on tour with The WAEVE, Graham Coxon from Blur’s other band, in May.
“The band will be supporting Elbow in arenas around the country for a couple of weeks,” he says. “I’ll be on monitors, with Blur’s regular FOH engineer Matt Butcher at the other end of the multicore.”
