Roland Joins The Legends At Friends Of Mine Festival

With a line up truly worthy of its cult following and an enviable combination of legends and new acts, FOMFEST has grown from club nights in nearly every venue in Manchester to residencies in Liverpool and London and now to a fully fledged green field festival.

Paul Nicholson who runs Salisbury based Midas ProSound and Red Square Audio was asked to manage the audio systems across the 4 main FOMFEST stages. As a longstanding Roland user and dealer, and therefore extremely familiar with the product range, Paul decided to use FOMFEST to put  the new M-480 digital console through its paces in a live environment. Launched in April at the Pro Light & Sound, the M-480 is a central unit in a full V-Mixing System with a powerful new mixing engine, which can be integrated with Roland’s Digital Snakes, Personal Mixing and Multi-Channel Recording solutions.

In the Big Top Tent, the M-480 really demonstrated its capabilities as a live mixing console, taking care of FoH under the supervision of Simon Kenning from Roland throughout the three day event.  The intuitive user interface and features including rapid recall of setups/scenes, 25 - 100mm motorized faders, a high-res colour screen, and dedicated channel strip knobs for all bands of EQ, as well as Pan and Gain made it easy to setup, as well as quick to pick up for the guest engineers who were not familiar with using a digital console.  Also in the Big Top Tent, a second M-480 was used as a monitor desk providing intuitive network distribution of all the connected REAC devices located on stage, as well as controlling preamps and setting gain structure. 

Taking full advantage of the flexibility of a modular V-Mixer System, the S-4000-S3208 Digital Snake was installed in the Big Top as a digital interface at the side of the stage, providing 32 mic/line inputs and 8 outputs or returns.  The S4000 S-3208 was connected to a S-4000M REAC Merge Unit enabling all REAC network streams to be merged and giving the engineer the ability to choose a different preamp to use for each act. Designed for live sound, the high quality XR-1 mic pre-amps provide superb audio quality with up to 28dB headroom and can be controlled remotely from FOH or stage. 

Also part of the modular Digital Snake system the S-1608 stage unit, S-0816 FOH Unit and S-0808 I/O unit provided flexible configuration including the options of using external battery operation or embedded power supplied over REAC.

The benefits of digital audio transmission such as eliminating the loss of  high frequencies and intelligibility that you get with  analog cabling, combined with the inherent cost savings of using  Digital Snake products  make them a perfect choice for live sound applications. 

A similar setup at the Bowl Stage saw an M-480 at FoH with an S4000-S3208 and S-1608 in the setup. 

Paul comments: “The Roland V Mixer range offers both engineers and rental companies a highly flexible superb sounding solution, with a host of features only found on consoles that cost 4 or 5 times as much. I have been personally using their consoles for the last four years and we have sold dozens into all areas of the industry, every one of which has performed flawlessly. Reliability is such an important factor to consider when specifying consoles and we have had zero issues since we began using Roland products. I also like the 4 second boot up time, which is a godsend when someone inadvertently pulls the power or the generator packs up! The consoles did a sterling job at FOMFEST and we had nothing but compliments from all the engineers and bands. I would like to thank Roland for their support at this years’ festival and we shall certainly be using Roland consoles again at FOMFEST 2012”.