Yamaha DME eases the pressure at Live Earth and concert for Diana
Two of the UK's highest profile live events of 2007 took place at London's brand new Wembley Stadium at the beginning of July - and a Yamaha DME64N digital mix engine was a fundamental part of both events.
The Concert for Diana on 1st July was followed by the UK Live Earth gig seven days later, both featuring a diverse array of high profile acts playing short sets. From Elton Jon to the English National Ballet at the Diana concert, and from Madonna to Metallica at Live Earth, the requirements for each of the many acts were very different and, with extremely short turnaround times, the audio production was always going to be a major logistical challenge for sound company Britannia Row.
The monitor rig was especially tricky, as every member of every band had slightly different monitoring requirements. Brit Row needed a solution that could provide instant recall of all settings and allowing each monitor engineer to give their acts exactly what they needed, despite the very short breaks between each performance meaning that changing settings would be done under extreme pressure.
The company's solution was to employ three different monitor consoles, with a Yamaha DME64N digital mix engine to act as a switching matrix between them.
Using a DME in this way had already been tried by Brit Row at June's Wireless festival in London's Hyde Park and the success of the system meant that the company had the confidence to use it at the ultra-high profile Wembley shows.
"This year is one of first years that we've used digital desks on regular festivals, in that situation where bands just turn up and play with no sound check," says Brit Row monitor engineer Jon Lewis. "The DME seemed like the ideal way to make the changeovers between multiple consoles a lot easier and faster. It worked really well there, so we were totally confident in it. It was the obvious choice for the Diana concert and Live Earth."
Fitted with three MY8-ADDA96 cards, the DME64N allowed a complex system to be greatly simplified, eliminating the time which would have been required to re-patch the system when changing between the monitor consoles.
"It took care of all the outputs between the consoles and did the switchovers between them," says Brit Row's Jerry Wing. "We had everything sync referenced to an Apogee Big Ben and it enabled the entire monitor rig to be self-contained. Everything was singing from the same sheet, the system worked incredibly well."
As well as the MY8-ADDA96 cards, the DME64N utilised 16 channels of AES/EBU, some of which fed the AES channels on the digital consoles, with another 24 to the analogue desk, which allowed the system to maximise the number of channels.
"One of the particular advantages of using the DME was that the Diana concert had a 'house band' and we also needed two orchestral set ups," says Jon Lewis. "This meant over 60 outputs. We used it as a big switching matrix, but the biggest advantage was that the patching was already done within it.
"We did all the patching between the consoles and the DME in the warehouse and, once on site, it was a literally 'plug in and go' solution for a situation which would have been a lot more complex without it."
Jon continues: "During band changeovers we just had to hit one button on the DME's front panel to select the configuration for the next act, shout 'you have control' to the engineer on the relevant console and that was it. It saved huge amounts of time and trouble in the pressured environments of two such high profile shows."
The DME also supplied pink noise for line testing, if required. Permanently on tap, this was very useful for checking any apparent glitches in the system connections.
"The DME is really the only piece of kit that could do what we needed in this situation," says Jerry Wing. "The system saved a great deal of hassle. On top of that, people weren't generally aware it was there. It was pretty much invisible, which is precisely what you want in that situation."
Jon Lewis agrees. "It was great," he says. "It worked really, really well. I would definitely want to take out again in that type of situation."
