Washington, D.C. (January 24, 2017)—Every December finds the US Navy Band playing its annual holiday concerts at DAR Constitution Hall for more than 8,000 people across three performances on the weekend prior to Christmas. This past holiday season, the Band made use of three DiGiCo SD10 desks it owns in order to tackle FOH, monitors and live broadcast streaming.
Additionally, three DiGiCo SD-Racks were used on stage for I/O, all connected in a fiber loop with HMA Optics clocking at 96 kHz—nicely replacing two 56-pair, three-way split snakes used prior to making the switch to the SD10s a few years ago. Petty Officer 1st Class (MU1) Christopher Trupe handled FOH mixing and the production’s sound design dealt with 100 inputs and that he had preamp control at the FOH SD10, while the other two consoles enabled gain tracking on their inputs after the show had been “teched out.”
Petty Officer 1st Class Francis DuBois, monitor engineer at the stage-left SD10, had four wedge mixes on deck that consisted of two Meyer UM-100Ps, two MJF-210s and two UPM-1Ps. In addition, there were 13 stereo in-ear mixes provided by Shure PSM 1000s and P6HWs, with the musicians using Sensaphonics 2MAX earphones. A variety of microphones from Neumann, Earthworks, DPA, Sennheiser and Shure dotted the stage as well as Radial direct boxes.
Chief Petty Officer Brian Bowman, at the SD10 for the live stream broadcast over the internet, was paired up with the Waves SoundGrid Extreme Server for plug-ins. This console also took care of multitracking the entire show using two Waves MGB boxes to record up to 128 tracks at 96 kHz/24-bit into Nuendo Live on two redundant laptops via SoundGrid and recorded onto Avastor external drives.
Coatesville, Pennsylvania-based DBS Audio Systems, Inc. supplied the PA, which consisted of 20 Meyer Lyons mains enclosures paired with 18 Meyer Leopards for outfill. In addition, DBS provided six Minas for front-fill and two 900-LFC subs in cardioid mode. All of this was fed at 96kHz/24-bit through two Meyer GalileoCallisto 616 AES.
United States Navy Band
www.navyband.navy.mil
DBS Audio Systems
www.dbsaudio.com
DiGiCo
www.DiGiCo.biz
