DiGiCo SD8 Adds Colombia To Its Itinerary

22 April 2010 17.17 BST

When Colombian rental company C Villa worked with a DiGiCo SD8 on a tour by Grammy-winning singer Carlos Vives, so impressed were the staff by its performance that it wasn’t long before the company purchased one for its own inventory, adding another country to the console’s world itinerary.

Vives’ FOH engineer Rob ‘Cubby’ Colby is a keen DiGiCo user and C Villa proprietor Mauricio Vilar Martinez felt the SD8 would be the ideal product for the company.

“The audio quality, dynamics and frequency response are all excellent and I really like being able to connect the remote snake via MADI,” said Mauricio.

“When it came off the plane from the UK, we started using it right away, without even reading the manual. It worked really well from the start.”

One of the more challenging events the SD8 has already been used on is at the Festival of Classic Music, held annually in Cartagena, in the north of the country. This was the fourth year that C Villa had worked on the festival, with Mauricio deploying the console on an outdoor concert by the City of London Symphony Orchestra, where expectations were high but soundcheck time minimal.

“The audience was approximately 700 strong and every single one of them wanted to hear CD quality sound, despite us having very little soundcheck time,” said Mauricio.

“With a rock band where you have three guys on drums, bass and keyboards, people spend two or more hours soundchecking. With a 60-piece orchestra, we get five or ten minutes if we're lucky!” he added, with a rueful grin.

50 inputs from the orchestra microphones, plus an MC, were mixed on the SD8 and output to an Adamson Y10 line array system using XTA processing.

“The biggest challenge was mixing 50 channels of very sensitive microphones, just one block away from the beach. There was a lot of breeze, which can end up bleeding through the mics,” said Mauricio. “So we had to use a lot of high-pass filtering.”

With the console’s onboard processing also used to good effect with soft compression, graphic EQ for the PA and four different types of reverb, Mauricio was very pleased with the results.

“The SD8 did a great job,” he said. “Its preamp stage is very clean, which means a better signal path and signal to noise ratio, providing a better sound at the output stage.”

Lack of rehearsal and soundcheck time meant that the C Villa staff mixed the concert on the fly and they also did a straight mix for Colombian television.

“The impression our clients have is that every year it gets better and better. So that makes us happy. We are very pleased with the SD8’s performance,” Mauricio concluded.

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