"By choosing the best on offer, such as Soundcraft, Clear-Com and Shure, Microhire wins 98% of all business within the venue," noted Russell Bennett, Microhire's general manager QLD.
Three Soundcraft Si Expression consoles (16, 24 and 32 channel versions) were supplied to the venue and senior audio operator Mick Wade has been extremely happy with the purchase.
"They deliver amazing bang for buck," he stated. "We have Stageboxes with each surface so when it comes to I/O's, I can't think of any other console that gives you this amount of I/O's for the money. Plus you get sixteen mix busses all with graphic EQ's."
Mick reports that his crew has commented that the Expression consoles are very easy to use and that they don't have to worry about training as the console is very obvious in its usage.
"Having a delay on every input and every output as a dedicated knob is handy," added Mick. "The amount of graphics and ease of use of getting to them, is really good too. The fact that it has a little matrix is also a nice feature for a console of that price."
A Clear-Com Tempest digital wireless system was also on the shopping list with the set up comprising of a four-channel BaseStation and a party line, single channel BeltStation.
"We loop the four channels out of the wired comms into the wireless so that we have four loops that can talk to wired and wireless," explained Mick. "It's been performing really well and the coverage is awesome. In fact we've not had one coverage issue with the Clear-Com Tempest. We did a test where we were in the offices on the other side of the auditorium with four base brick cement walls and 150m between us, and we could still use them without boosting the signal."
Mick was very impressed by the ease of set up with the Clear-Com Tempest revealing that it only took him half an hour to set up and he's never had to look at it again!
"They're pretty much trouble free," he said. "We also purchased a Shure ULX-D Digital Wireless System mainly for its cascading abilities; being able to use one set of antennas and just cascade them so you don't need a distro. The quality of the radio frequency is awesome
" I used the ULX-D's to do a crazy background / paging system setup whereby we had to send intercom down into car park and places where there was no infrastructure for sending audio. We did this for five days using that set up and because we had the lithium ion batteries they'd last all day. Plus because they have the gain function easily accessible, we had a great gain structure and fantastic sound even though it was traveling over hops of fifty metres. Basically it sounded as good as a hard wired system."
Sixteen Shure ULX-D units comprising thirteen single, two dual, and a quad channel receiver were installed. As the RICC has eight meeting rooms, each room could have its own single channel set up whilst the quad and duals are used for larger events.
(Jim Evans)
