Nitelites director Andy Magee, who has been working with Ben since 2012, elected to take up the FOH position, with Barrie Pitt mixing monitors. They use SD7s, he says, simply because they are head and shoulders above anything else.
"The band knows exactly what they want and we try very hard to give it to them. It's always a challenge and every console we use is pushed to the limits of its performance," he says. "Almost all the band members are engineers and have worked in studios, so they push us really hard. It's good for us because it keeps us sharp.
"The SD7 sounds great. There's still nothing that comes close to it for performance and it still keeps getting better. The monitor console has 140 channels into 48 outputs at 96kHz and there's no other console that can do that or the complicated routing we need."
At FOH the show is heavily dependent on automation and by using the SD7, Andy knows he can do just what he needs to do.
"If things change during the show, I can hit a safe button and get exactly what I need," he says. "The band is great and the show sounds fantastic; the layering in the music is really subtle. With other consoles you just don't hear everything with such depth."
Andy's SD7 has the addition of a Waves Soundgrid, along with a DiGiGrid MGB to multitrack every show to a MacBook, which he plays back to Ben each day. Barrie, meanwhile, has a Universal Audio Apollo 16 plugin server with a DiGiCo Mini-Rack.
A pair of SD9s are also employed as the support band consoles.
(Jim Evans)
