Taking care of FOH and monitors for the La Mercé headline stage at BAM, the M-5000 and M-5000C together with Roland Digital Snakes provided a flexible and intuitive solution with their O.H.R.C.A architecture rapidly adapting to all the changing requirements and offering appropriate workflows for each situation.
The BAM Festival, now in its twentieth year, comprises of more than 40 bands playing different venues across Barcelona over five days and coincides with La Mercé, the city's patron saint festival. BAM is renowned for bringing together technology and tradition, music and the performing arts and 2015 saw Marc Campillo, the founder and director of the independent label Foehn Records take the helm to deliver what was a truly innovative event.
For the Saturday night performances on the La Mercé stage, the M-5000 mixed down 72 channels delivered from the I/O boxes on the stage before splitting the signals down to the compact M-5000C at monitor position. Inputs from the bands playing were provided by the Roland S-4000S-3208 Digital Snake (32x8 Modular Stage Unit). The M-5000 used REAC (Roland Ethernet Audio Communication) to connect via Cat 5e cable at 96kHz to the S-4000S-3208.
Commenting on the setup, Roland ProAV product manager Nico Suarez says, "There were a couple of features of the M-5000 that really stood out on this job. Since everything outdoors in Barcelona has to have a limiter inserted, the ability to use any input or output on the system to make an insert point was great. On top of that, having two insert points, one before EQ&DYN and the other after EQ&DYN, on each channel/buss; allowed me to use the on board limiter for the master before the real one was inserted and have control over the attacks and releases."
(Jim Evans)
