Live sound production company Delicate Productions (Camarillo,Calif.) was callled upon to provide the audio playback system for therecent gala invitation-only charity premiere organized by MGM at theShrine Auditorium for Die Another Day, the latest movie in theJames Bond franchise.
Engineer/system designer Lyle Dick, in coordination with contractorBoston Sound & Light, assembled and installed the sound system forthe 4,000-seat auditorium around an InnovaSon Grand Live fully digitalmixing console. For this premiere, the movie’s soundtrack was presentedin Dolby Digital Surround-EX format.
“This system was only the main channels and one set of backups,”Dick said. “We had six channels from the booth, plus a feed from thered carpet.” Audio from the temporary projection booth, constructed onthe balcony of the venue, was fed via an InnovaSon Stage Box through apair of coaxial cables to the FOH position.
“We took the left-right surround feed and did a direct patch out ofthe console into the Dolby box and brought that mix back for the EX[rear-surround] channel,” Dick continued. “We setup two scenes so thatif one projector went down, we could switch scenes and then pull theleft and right surround from the other projector and patch those intothe Dolby box.
“We fed the digital AES outputs of the InnovaSon directly into thedigital inputs of the BSS Soundweb. So we remained digital from theStage Box all the way to the amplifiers, because we used the Soundwebsas crossovers. There was no analog anywhere apart for some intercom.”XLR cables fed the outputs of the console to the BSS Soundweb at theFOH, and then RJ45 cable linked the processors located at eachamplifier rack, which powered a multichannel system comprised of MartinAudio, Adamson and Apogee speaker systems.
“It was pretty straight-ahead, but it was definitely a first for us,doing digital to digital,” Dick concluded. “That was a nice experimentand it worked great: lots of headroom, and nice and clean.”
For more, visit Innovason online at www.innovason.com.
