Burbank, CA (October 23, 2020)—In late September, the iHeartRadio Theater Los Angeles in Burbank, California hosted the 10th annual iHeartRadio Music Festival. While it is always a streaming, radio and TV broadcast event, this year’s edition had to be held in front of a virtual audience, but that didn’t stop artists like Alicia Keys, Bon Jovi, BTS, Coldplay, Kane Brown with special guests Khalid and Swae Lee, Keith Urban, Migos, Miley Cyrus, Thomas Rhett with Jon Pardi, Usher and others from giving their all. The event was a thrill for fans, but for the team at the Theater, it represented a chance to finally put its two new consoles—a DiGiCo SD12 and the recently introduced DiGiCo Quantum338—to work.
Jason Batuyong, the venue’s head of audio for the past year, and his team, which includes FOH mixer Josh Manville and monitor mixer Matt Russell, knew that they wanted a compact SD12 at the front-of-house position in the theater, which has a capacity of around 500 standing plus another 150 to 200 on the mezzanine. “Having an SD12 at front-of-house saves us so much space because it’s so small, yet it still has all the functionality. And that made everybody happy, because everyone that normally congregates at front-of-house suddenly had more room,” he said.
Live Sound Turns to Livestreaming
Tipped off to hold off on ordering a monitor desk until after the 2020 NAMM Show in January, Batuyong and Co. wound up ordering one of the first Quantum338 desks soon after it was announced at the convention. The venue’s new Quantum338 is fitted with 112 inputs and 48 outputs, all incorporating DiGiCo’s new “Ultimate Stadius” 32-bit ADC and DAC conversion, plus DMI-AES cards supporting 16 AES I/O. Two SD-Racks are connected optically, he said: “We run everything on a loop and share the head amps, one mixer using the gains and setting them, and then everybody using trims beyond that. No one is using gain tracking. We found that that works the best for us.”
The iHeartRadio Theater Los Angeles shut down due to the pandemic in March but didn’t receive the Q338 until June, so the festival was the maiden voyage for the Q338. Batuyong noted, “Everyone was extremely excited because, with quarantine, nobody had been able to see this console. Some artists’ FOH mixers were little bit worried about bringing their files and how the file converter was going to work, but all of that worked seamlessly and was absolutely great. But most people started the mix from scratch. That was easier for the shortened sets that they were going to play. And everyone said, on their next tour, they want a Q338.”
iHeartRadio Theater Los Angeles • www.iheart.com
DiGiCo • www.DiGiCo.biz
