Sweetwater Digital Productions’ chief engineer Mark Hale seated at the Studer Vista 8 in Regensdorf, Switzerland.
Los Angeles-based Sweetwater Digital Productions chose a Studer Vista 8 digital mixing console for a new 53-foot, double-expando HDTV production truck designed to accommodate large-scale concerts, awards ceremonies and other high-profile entertainment events.
“The Vista 8 was actually one of the first product decisions we made,” says Sweetwater chief engineer Mark Hale (pictured). “Aside from the fact that many of the top-end audio mixers here in L.A. have been saying very complimentary things about the desk’s operation, I was impressed with it from an engineering perspective. I particularly liked the way that the I/O system is structured and how it uses MADI lines for routing signals out to various places. It was immediately apparent how that would cut down on a lot of integration time and cabling for us.”
Hale further cites Studer’s willingness to tailor a solution to meet Sweetwater’s needs as another key factor in choosing the console. “Studer has been extremely accommodating and wonderful to work with,” he says. “As an example, they spent a lot of time helping us interface the Vista 8 with our Philips Jupiter system, which will permit us to control all of our audio crosspoints through Jupiter’s software. And with 256 tielines between the console and router, we’ll be able to very easily route any microphone or crosspoint to any tape machine without having to even think about leaving the internal I/O.”
According to Hale, the Vista 8’s highly customizable I/O frames and comprehensive redundancy capabilities were also considered as appealing features.
Employing 20 rack-mounted Studer D21m I/O frames and two new SCore Live DSP cores–one for the console and another for the 1024×816 router–Sweetwater Digital Productions’ new desk is the largest Vista 8 ever manufactured in terms of input and output size.
For more information, visit www.studer.ch, www.harmanpro.com and www.sweetwaterdigital.com.
