Pro Sound Web: Monitors for touring and at festivals present a unique set of conditions and challenges, with digital console technology helping engineers rise to the occasion. It’s also interesting to see the ways that networking is serving to more closely ally house and monitors.
2 comments:
The most interesting part of the article for me was the section about the Stanford Jazz Festival and that the FOH engineer was also doing the monitor and recording mixes. That just seems like too much for one person to handle, regardless of whether or not the console has the ability to do so. Why compromise the sound of the PA or monitor mix by having one guy run both when you can be sure that everything sounds perfect by using two engineers instead? It's definitely cool that the console making doing all of that easy but is it really necessary?
I think this article sheds some light on how fast the world of monitor engineering is changing with the available technology in the audio field. I can specifically relate to the first portion of the article where Alan Glas is mixing monitors on a Vi1. This is because most of my mixing experience has been on a Soundcraft Vi4 (a larger format console to the Vi1, running the same software). In my situation the console was our FOH mixing console and thats where we mixed monitors from as well. This console is incredible in the exact same way the Alan's Vi1 is due to its large snapshot scope. For example, we had a big battle of the bands where over the course of three days we would tech and preform a show with up to 25 groups preforming. This snapshotting capability allowed me to cue each act in their preliminary tech time, tweak my mix in the times after that and finally when the show came around I was able to simply pull up the cue and mix the band from a good base point. As for the other consoles mentioned, I do not have as much hands on experience with them but based on this article I am sure that they leave the engineer in a similar good place.
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