At Pop Idol, for which Jackson and Chaney also handled monitor and FOH control respectively in 2001, they are working through Barry Mizen's company Audio Village. "In fact all three companies have reconvened on this project," said Fred.
The monitor engineer was first exposed to the framework of the SPX 2000 when he was invited down to Yamaha's R&D Centre at Chiswick. "They were looking at different reverb algorithms as plug-ins for the DM2000, which was very impressive. I thought no more about it until I saw the SPX 2000 at the PLASA Show. I knew Pop Idol was coming up and urgently needed to purchase some reverbs. After hearing what I'd heard in Chiswick I was really keen - even though I hadn't used them."
While Fred Jackson's primary function is to provide basic separation of front-of-house to stage, FOH engineer Martin Dineley has been able to use Plus 4 Audio's brace of SPX 2000's more expansively. A regular customer of Marquee Audio, Chaney had also taken note of the company's recent SPX 2000 publicity, and once he had made the purchasing decision, up-spec'ed from the pair of SPX 990s originally detailed. He states that it has allowed Martin Dineley to MIDI up the system and experiment with the REV-X reverb algorithm, adding that the processor is intuitive to a DM2000 user. "I was really looking forward to the new DM 2000 software release, but since this is not yet available the SPX 2000 gave us a head start on the new algorithms. They are much warmer and more natural sounding than the old machines and the colour scheme is good fun - you know what you are doing when you change from one library to the other."
The Pop Idol sound production team also worked on the recent National Music Awards at the Carling Apollo, Hammersmith and will be on duty at the Royal Variety Performance at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre in November.
(Lee Baldock)
