The enhanced sound quality owed its success to the faith invested by Simon Honywill, sound designer for the control and monitor system suppliers RG Jones, and the support offered throughout by Marquee Audio's digital expert Andy Huffer.
It was Huffer who had proposed the digital solution to Honywill near the beginning of the year - suggesting three of Optocore's DD32E network devices to transmit a maximum amount of digital data at high speed.
Marquee are not only the official UK distributors of Optocore fibre networks but are also Digidesign resellers, and Andy Huffer was on hand at FOH to support the consulting engineering team of Simon Honywill, Diarmuid McLennan and Robb Allan (who was providing Digidesign training support). Two Digidesign Venues piggy-backed between acts throughout the Festival, allowing the incoming sound engineers to create their mix and run the show from the smaller, networked D-Show Profile.
"The idea was to establish 100% digital signal solution via AES I/O's," explained Huffer. One DD32E was at the FOH console, and the other two were at the left and right stage wings.
The two large D-Shows fed AES signals to the D-Show Profile and then out to the Optocore DD32E's; the Profile output was then transmitted by optical fibre to the AES inputs of the XTA 428 processors, along with RS485 control information.
The signal remained in the digital domain throughout, before transferring to analogue from the loudspeaker processors to the MC2 amplifiers.
Huffer remarked that the combination of Venue's mix-buss algorithms and Optocore's high speed transmission resulted in optimum audio quality "It was noted particularly how clear the vocals sounded," he said.
Simon Honywill added, "We wanted to keep the signal in the digital domain for as long as possible - and were able to do so right up to the speaker processors. The reaction received was really positive. It all worked seamlessly and Andy made sure that the system was rock solid."
(Jim Evans)
