Pet Shop Boys FOH Engineer Holger Schwark
London, UK (July 22, 2013)—For the Pet Shop Boys’ recent Electric world tour, the band’s sound engineers Holger Schwark (FOH) and Seamus Fenton (monitors) used a multicore system from Optocore to help transfer signals and keep the sound within the digital domain.
Schwark and Fenton chose DiGiCo SD10-24 consoles as well as a DiGiCo SD-Rack at the monitor desk. While the consoles come equipped with an optical loop interface, the duo decided instead to run Optocore as an independent network in order to keep the entire workflow digital. Sound provider Capital Sound supplied a Nexo STM PA line array for the tour.
Having the Optocore system in place gave the team greater flexibility to patch signals between their “playback world,” the SD-Rack, the two mixing desks, a MADI-equipped Mac Mini at FOH and FX units at FOH, along with an additional independent MADI output for occasional multichannel recording.
“Once we started using Optocore DD4MEs, it quickly became obvious how much extra flexibility they gave us in patching communication mics across or sending FOH special effects back to monitors, without needing an XLR return core,” said Scwark.
“Optocore is our entire backbone,” Schwark continued. “It allows me to patch everything through the network. I connect both of the consoles’ ports to the network, as well as my peripherals, and can now use the desk’s built-in tricks for virtual soundchecks for, say, 40 recorded channels, while still connecting to my reverb engines and analyzer software on the higher-numbered channels.”
Optocore
www.optocore.com
