Beachsound deploys SD5, SD8, SD9 and SD11 consoles for Miami’s huge EDM event
MIAMI — Audio at an EDM festival, how hard can it be? Triple the usual number of subs and have the DJ send left/right to the console, hand him a wireless mic and crank it up. Easy. Right? Wrong. EDM shows require a specific kind of flexibility and complete reliability as evidenced by Miami’s Beachsound, which relies exclusively on DiGiCo consoles for one of the EDM world’s biggest annual events, Ultra Music Festival.
“We are managing a lot of audio,” says Beachsound crew chief Neil Rosenstock who has headed up the company’s audio team at Ultra for five years. “If you are on a show with 96 inputs and you lose a channel, there are still 95 channels of audio to listen to. If you lose a channel on an EDM show, you just lost half of the PA. The productions look cool, but without the music they’re just blinking lights.”
Rock-solid reliability is a must and it is telling that Beachsound has DiGiCo SD5, SD8, SD9 and SD11 desks in its inventory, and during Ultra every console in the shop goes out on the gig.
“For Ultra 2014 we had an SD5 at the Main Stage feeding an SD11 as the production console,” Rosenstock reports. “We have been all-digital from the time the signal hits the SD-Rack for about four years now. Everything from the console to the amps is run AES and the connection from the SD-Rack to the SD5 is all fiber. We are taking S/PDIF outputs from the DJs to feed the PA along with an analog feed as a backup.”
Ultra is one of the biggest EDM events in the world, drawing some 200,000 attendees to Bayfront Park in downtown Miami every spring. In addition to the SD5 and SD11 at the Main Stage this year, Beachsound provided an SD9 on the Radio Stage and an SD8 for one act on the Live Stage.
In addition to ease-of-use and overall sound quality, Beachsound turns to DiGiCo for some very specific needs for Ultra. In particular, the onboard dynamic process as well as the ease of integration with the Waves plug-in architecture.
“DJs have EQ and that can be a challenge,” says Rosenstock. “The DiGiCo EQ and compression allow us to keep an overall consistency in the sound despite every DJ providing us with very different EQ. The onboard dynamics processing is crucial in managing overall volume no matter how hard the act is pushing the inputs. Ultra is shoehorned into a relatively small area for a music festival and we have to keep it down to 106 dB A-weighted, which can be a challenge.”
And Beachsound is spreading the DiGiCo gospel to other parts of the EDM world. “Last year, we had an act come in whose engineer was not familiar with DiGiCo and because of an issue with his console he had to use our SD5,” White recalls. “Initially, he was not happy about it, but he seemed to soften up during the actual show. This year, he was back and told me he has been touring with an SD11 ever since last year’s Ultra.”
Beachsound owner Andre Serafini sums it up by adding, “As a rental house we stock several console brands to meet rider requirements. But when the decision is ours, the choice is always DiGiCo. We wouldn’t do a gig like Ultra with anything else.”
About DiGiCo
DiGiCo is a UK-based manufacturer of some of the world’s most popular, successful and groundbreaking digital mixing consoles for the live, theatre, broadcast and post production industries and is exclusively distributed in the U.S. by Group One Ltd. of Farmingdale, New York. For more information, go to: www.DiGiCo.biz
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