Yahoo! Music in Santa Monica, Calif. teamed up with its sponsor, Nissan, to present a diverse series of concerts entitled “Nissan Live Sets on Yahoo! Music,” which are streamed online through music.yahoo.com/nissanlivesets. The concerts were performed in front of a live audience, and featured popular artists such as Christina Aguilera, Maroon 5, Velvet Revolver and most recently, Kelly Clarkson. Yahoo! Music selected the Holophone H2-PRO Surround Sound Microphone to capture the shows.
The H2-PRO is permanently installed above the middle of the soundstage on the Fox Studio lot where the bi-monthly Live Sets are performed. The H2-PRO is pointed directly from stage-reference to the middle of the room and is used for audience reaction, which enhances the feel of a live concert for online viewers. In preparation for Yahoo! Music’s move to broadband transmission, the concert series is being recorded entirely in 7.1 surround sound.
“Recording the concert series in HD, we wanted to ensure that our audio quality lived up to the experience,” states Ian Dittbrenner, director of studio and content operations for Yahoo!. “The H2-PRO creates a pristine 7.1 base for each production. Every person who has mixed with the H2-PRO has made comments like, ‘What is this microphone? Wow, it’s amazing!’”
The switch to surround and the frequency of productions requires ease of use and an audio configuration with diverse sound pick-up. The H2-PRO can be used in a fixed installation, while still adapting to the various audience configurations.
“I used to have different mics set up all over the stage for additional capture and audience reaction, but I recently stopped doing it because the H2-PRO captures all I need and doing anything else was a waste of time,” says Dittbrenner. “Using the Holophone H2-PRO is fabulous and it gives me a luxurious bed of surround audio that all of our other audio relies on. The Holophone gives me much more than I’m able to get out of any other surround microphone.”
For more information, visit www.holophone.com and http://music.yahoo.com/. To read Mix‘s August 2007 cover story on Yahoo! Music Studios, click here.
