"Some venues were better than others," explains Manasse. "We played everything from nasty night clubs to beautiful concert halls and theatres, so we had to rely on local racks and stacks for the shows in Europe. It would have been really difficult to carry enough PA to cover such a variety of venues, and at this point it's just not cost effective.
"The DiGiCo D1 really helps where you don't have a consistent system. The output stage has got insertable processing channels (IPCs), so I could tune any system and time align it without having to carry extensive outboard. It's a very powerful tool. We had an Adamson Y10 line array for the UK dates with XTA DP226s running the system, which made an enormous difference."
Manasse ran what was originally his local rack on stage with a DiGiCo MiniRack at FOH. "I have an XTA D2 over Wainwright's vocals to eliminate unwanted peaks in his voice. I use the D2 rather than the console for this because I want to compress or limit more than one frequency at a time, and I find it easier to do it with an external unit. Other than that, I am using only the console's internal effects, four reverbs and the tap delay."
The D1's snapshots feature was used extensively between the support band and Wainwright, with Manasse performing a simple digital repatch. By sharing some of the cables on stage, he had to do nothing more than put a different mic on the end of a cable to give the opening act's engineer his own channels to play with, which Manasse found to be an easy and quick solution.
System technician Aaron Ross is in charge of the XTA DP226s, which he uses as simple crossovers for the system, controlled by XTA's new AudioCore 8 software via a wireless tablet. He explains: "I'm using one DP226 as a master at FOH. I like having the rest of the crossovers in the amp racks because it means I can have as many zones as I want. One day I can have a rig set up as left/right flown, left/right on the ground with in fills and out fills, and then next day have just left and right and there's no repatching involved. Just a little bit of work in AudioCore and you're done. And it's very accurate."
The configuration of these XTA DP226s is slightly unusual. "We've got lots of XTAs in different racks that are all linked," says Manasse. "The 485data links all the units together, and then we bring the data output of the last unit back to the input of the first unit making a continuous loop (something I pioneered at the McCartney concert in Red Square). All in all, this seems to be about as foolproof and easy to use a system as you can get."
(Chris Henry)
