Aspen, CO (September 18, 2014)—Since 1949, The Aspen Music Festival and School has been one of the most famous classical music festivals in the world, hosting more than 350 performances between June and August each year.
The Festival, which features four in-residence orchestras where students play alongside faculty, is recorded each year and can be heard on American Public Media (APM), Colorado Public Radio and Aspen Public Radio. As part of the equipment used to record the performances, The Festival uses several Neumann M 150 microphones at its principal venue: Benedict Music Tent.
Festival performances are mostly orchestral in content and can range anywhere from small chamber ensembles (three, four or five musicians) up to more than 100 musicians and a full choir on stage. Each year, the main microphone array at the Benedict Music Tent consists of a Decca tree with five Neumann M 150 Tube microphones placed in the center and arrayed across the stage.
“Our Neumann M 150 Tube microphones, which were a gift from the Sidney E. Frank Foundation, have been a staple of the Festival for a long time,” said Scott Burgess, head audio engineer, Aspen Music Festival and School. “It is of paramount importance for us to capture every instance of what these incredibly talented students are doing onstage, and the M 150 lends a warm sound that makes the orchestra shine in all of our recordings and broadcast transmissions across the country.”
This year, the Neumann M 150s were routed to Grace Design and Millennia Media preamplifiers situated in the catwalk of the venue before being converted by an RME AD/DA interface and subsequently routed to a Studer digital console in the control room. The team relied on several Sennheiser HD 600s for headphone monitoring, including at Front of House.
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