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Tag: DiGiCo Quantum338

  • AR Rahman’s 2025 Wonderment Tour Takes the Fourier Audio transform.engine Global

    AR Rahman’s 2025 Wonderment Tour Takes the Fourier Audio transform.engine Global

    If anyone ever deserved the term “global,” it would be Allahrakka Rahman. Known to fans the world over as ARR, the composer, musician, record producer, singer, songwriter, and philanthropist is best known for his scoring of Tamil and Hindi cinema, as well as for international films—work that has earned him two Academy Awards, six National Film Awards, a pair of Grammy Awards, a BAFTA, and a Golden Globe, plus a slew of plaudits from his native India’s film industry. ARR spent much of this past year on a world tour, the 2025 Wonderment Tour, which included cities across North America and the UK, including Vancouver, Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, Toronto, Manchester, and Birmingham. Most recently, his show hit home in Hyderabad, Pune, and Mumbai.

    Each of these performances benefited from the use of Fourier Audio’s transform.engine, a VST3 plugin host server that lets live sound engineers reliably run VST3 plugins with extremely low latency. The transform.engine was utilized on the Wonderment excursion by both FOH engineer Riyasdeen Riyan and monitor engineer Mark Thomas, who were also pairing it with Fourier’s transform.suite ’25 software bundle on their respective DiGiCo Quantum338 consoles.

    Interestingly, Thomas says that he and his colleague, Riyan, initially discovered the transform.engine online, via social media. “We heard about it and then secured a demo unit before we went on tour,” he recalls. “We were looking for a way to transition from Waves to a third-party platform, which would support third-party plugins and beyond. The transform.engine fit the bill perfectly. And now, over the course of the entire tour, both of us have completely adopted it into our workflows. It was that transformative.”

    FOH engineer Riyasdeen Riyan says that he’s had a lot of success using many plugins through the transform.engine—including Oeksound Soothe Live, LiquidSonics’ Seventh Heaven and Cinematic Rooms bundles, Gullfoss Live, and SoundToys’ Crystallizer and EchoBoy—but its big advantage for him has been in the workflow department, and specifically for achieving a studio-level of sonic quality for that processing. “We can replicate live whatever effects that we are using in studio,” he says. “Whomever the artists are that we are working with, including ARR, they are mostly from the studio world, and now we can replicate whatever they used in their original sessions, easily and reliably.”

    Riyan says this extends granularly to each plugin’s various parameters—“the kind and tempo of delay, the kind of effects, or the robotic vocals, or the harmonies… everything”—that allows them to recreate the studio experience onstage.

    Thomas, who is also using a DMI-KLANG immersive IEM mixing system card on the shows, is applying the transform.engine primarily for his Valhalla and LiquidSonics reverb plugins, as well as the Oeksound Soothe Live dynamic resonance suppressor, which is part of the transform.suite ’25 bundle that he inserts on his console’s mix bus.

    “The transform.suite ’25 software is our primary plugin bundle that we’re using on the tour right now,” he says. But the main “transformative” aspect of the transform.engine for him is in the workflow. “The major change that has happened is that the sonic quality I previously wanted with using these plugins depended upon using a server,” he explains. “With the transform.engine, I can load up exactly the plugins that I need and have the flexibility of using them with time-code synchronization—so virtually zero latency.”

    That’s critical for ARR’s complex shows, he says, due to the large number and frequency of the snapshots needed. “We have a lot of changes in the plugins’ parameters, which the transform.engine handles very well,” he says. “And the coordination of the plugin host within the video environment allows us to tweak settings on the fly without going into a third-party screen. So the workflow is quite very fast and flexible, compared to most other plugin workflows that we’ve previously used. It really is transformative.”

  • Gracie Abrams Hits the Road Solo with DiGiCo Quantum338 Duo

    Gracie Abrams Hits the Road Solo with DiGiCo Quantum338 Duo

    Gracie Abrams is a lot of things: Grammy Award-nominated, featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and winner of the American Music Award for this year’s New Artist of the Year. But despite being the daughter of acclaimed filmmaker J.J. Abrams and television producer Katie McGrath, she’s no nepo baby. The talented 25-year-old singer-songwriter earned her signing with Interscope Records in 2019, and since then, her soulful voice and emotionally charged songwriting blending indie folk and pop has taken her a long way.

    Following high-profile opening slots on Olivia Rodrigo’s 2022 Sour Tour and Taylor Swift’s 2023/24 Eras Tour, Abrams has this year been out on her own headlining The Secret of Us Tour, which included a well-received Lollapalooza performance. And joining her on the road have been a pair of DiGiCo Quantum338 consoles, supplied by Clair Global and operated by engineers Dom Rizco at FOH and Juan Carlos Garcia-Spitz on monitors.

    Rizco started out with Abrams as both her front-of-house engineer and production manager, but the singer’s rapid success led him to focus solely on the mix. “With the scale of this tour, I figured, I’m just going to stick to the faders on this one,” he laughs.

    That still leaves him plenty to work on, though, with as many as 120 inputs at FOH, through his DiGiCo Quantum338 console with its Pulse software upgrade to 156 input channels and 72 aux/group busses. That control surface is paired with two full-sized SD-Racks on stage, plus another for the B and C stages, and MADI playback of tracks. “The combination of the Quantum’s flexibility and the Mustard processing is what lets me manage all of this,” he says. “A lot of the things that they’ve added – like the Mustard Source Expander, the Mustard EQs, and variety of compressors – it’s all so musical but also so manageable. We’re automating stuff like input-source changes, even routing different sockets on a song-by-song basis to channels. Because there are so many instruments on stage and everybody will just kind of pick up whatever they want to play, we have to make sure we can route them to the corresponding channels. The Quantum desk lets me make all of the moves completely reliably.”

    Abrams’ shows have a lot of dynamic range, with the crowd hushed for the ballads and full-throated for the rockers. To help manage that, Rizco is using Oeksound’s Soothe Live dynamic-resonance suppressor plugin through a Fourier Audio transform.engine, a Dante-connected server designed to run VST3-native software plugins in a live environment to bring premium studio software to live sound. “One of the big reasons I love DiGiCo is because they ‘play nice with others,’ and I use tools like the Fourier transform.engine up at front of house to run Soothe Live on vocals to help tame some of the harshness of the crowd bleed in the mic,” he explains.

    “The really big thing about DiGiCo is that it lets me do what I want the way I want, and that’s a big thing when a lot of other consoles won’t let you route audio a certain way and try and tell you that this is how your workflow should be,” he says. “DiGiCo just lets you do it however you need to do it, and that’s allowed me to try different things and finally come to a solution that works really well for any situation. I think that no matter what I’m mixing tomorrow, I would want to be on a DiGiCo Quantum.”

    For Juan Carlos Garcia-Spitz up in monitor world, the decision to use DiGiCo is an easy choice. “Anytime we start one of these projects, the other engineers and I get together and are like, ‘well, what do you want on this one?’ And one of DiGiCo’s strengths is handling multiple digital formats,” explains Abrams’ monitor engineer, who has also done road stints with Lizzie McAlpine, Iron & Wine, and others. “So being able to take in instruments without having to do an extra A/D conversion was pretty key for us; for instance, being able to do any kind of playback digitally via MADI. It’s such a strong suit of DiGiCo’s. There’s not really any other console that just has it as standard.”

    Garcia-Spitz, who’s become a fan of the Quantum’s Mustard and Spice Rack processing – “It allows me to do a proper vocal chain without needing an external effect in Waves,” he says – also cites the console’s unique management capabilities. “The monitor console is a hub for so many things on this tour,” he says. “There’s everything coming in off of the stage – four band members who each play three or four instruments – and then the rest of the crew integration with wireless comms and our directors. Any of the crew that are part of making the show happen, we’ll get them on a pack and it’ll go through me and the Q338, as well.”

    That’s especially important as the tour audiences, which began in theaters and have since grown to arenas, have gotten larger. “One of the big things about this show is that this crowd is very, very loud, so having crew on ears for comms was a really big key to just making sure that we’re all on the same page when we need to start,” he says. “As soon as the crowd sees her, they’re a physical force of nature in terms of sound – and it becomes part of the show’s sound. Even when we were opening up for Taylor, the Q338 desks were able to scale the show for us. DiGiCo has been there with us throughout all of that.”

    For all of its ability to manage a complex production, Garcia-Spitz says the Quantum338 also offers a level of user-friendliness that’s critical for a fast-paced, complex mission like his. “Because I have so many moving parts to manage, simplicity and consistency are key,” he explains. “I just want it to work, and to work fast, so I can make sure that everything is ready to go when I need it. So being able to do something like a full-blown vocal chain completely within the console, being able to route a three-band compressor into a de-esser into a dynamic EQ, and then being able to have a nice little optical compressor all as a chain set up within the channel makes my life so much easier – without having to add an external processor, and all with zero latency. The Quantum338 really does it all.”

  • First Baptist Rogers Deepens Immersion with KLANG:vokal+ Upgrade

    First Baptist Rogers Deepens Immersion with KLANG:vokal+ Upgrade

    First Baptist Church of Rogers, Arkansas may be on the traditional side, philosophically speaking, but the 2,000-seat worship center at its newly-opened Pleasant Grove main campus is decidedly modern and tech-forward. Underscoring that point is the fact that First Baptist Rogers recently decided to supercharge its former sanctuary’s two KLANG:vokal immersive in-ear monitor mixing systems with the very latest :vokal+ software upgrade for its new space, which began hosting services in April.

    After a quick download and simple installation, the church’s worship band, vocalists, and orchestra members now have access to a greater number of inputs for their IEM mixes—up from :vokal’s initial input count of 24 to 64—connected via a Dante network. And while the singers and instrumentalists onstage are enjoying immersive monitoring, the entire congregation is also experiencing its own panoramic sound via an L-Acoustics L-ISA system installed by MG Systems, which also put a DiGiCo Quantum338 console into place at front of house.

    “We’ve been using KLANG:vokal since 2021, starting during the pandemic, and it’s been fantastic,” comments the church’s media manager, David Bullard. “The new :vokal+ upgrade has really expanded the system’s capabilities, allowing our musicians to potentially hear many more sources if they choose, and not limiting their mixes to just 24 inputs.”

    Based on a powerful, ultra-low latency FPGA core, the standard KLANG:vokal offers 12 mixes of 24 mono or stereo inputs; but now, First Baptist Rogers is operating a full 64 input channels, regardless of 48 or 96 kHz or the EQ setting. “The nice part about the KLANG:vokal and :vokal+ is the added flexibility of having a more immersive experience,” he says. “Instead of just having mono channels that you’re panning left or right, you can have binaural channels that truly immerse you in your mix,” he explains. “It makes you feel better about what you’re playing. KLANG has absolutely upped the game for those who are on the platform leading worship and playing instruments.”

    Bullard describes the church’s musical worship style as hybrid, combining traditional and contemporary, utilizing both a band and an orchestra. Having all of them sharing the same immersive environment has helped elevate the overall experience for them and for worshipers. “I do think that KLANG allows our musicians to connect with the music much more than simply being able to hear themselves,” he says. “They get a nice three-dimensional mix in their ears to where they feel like they’re not just playing to headphones—they’re playing to the environment.”

    KLANG even ultimately played a role in extending that experience to the new Pleasant Grove worship space. “Putting in the L-ISA system felt like the natural next move, because spatial audio is increasingly becoming the standard,” he says. “A lot of churches and bigger venues are switching to this more immersive audio experience, and so we wanted to bring that same feeling placement, depth, and engagement that we got from KLANG onstage to everyone in our services.”

  • Maluma Adopts Twin Quantum338 Pair for Papi Juancho Tour

    Maluma Adopts Twin Quantum338 Pair for Papi Juancho Tour

    After a nearly two-year hiatus from touring, Colombian singer-songwriter Juan Luis Londoño Arias—better known as Maluma—joyously hit the road for his two-month, 27-stop Papi Juancho Tour in support of his fifth Sony Music Latin studio album, which dropped in August 2020. Although Clair Global provided a Cohesion CO-10 PA system and touring support for the Latin Grammy-winning artist’s third large-scale tour of North American arenas, the front-of-house and monitor mixes were both performed on a new pair of DiGiCo Quantum338 consoles that Maluma purchased for his own touring inventory.

    “I’ve been mixing on DiGiCo consoles for at least 15 years now and they’ve always been my favorites,” says Lucas Pinzón, who has spent the past six years running FOH for the reggaeton/pop superstar that has collaborated with everyone from Shakira, Jennifer Lopez, and Madonna to Ricky Martin, J Balvin, and The Weeknd. “In my early days with Maluma, I worked on a variety of consoles—SD8, SD10, SD5—that were provided by local suppliers. He eventually acquired his first package of consoles and peripherals that included an SD12, which I really enjoyed for its compact size and comprehensive processing. But now that Maluma’s show and channel count have grown, we’ve upgraded to the Quantum338 platform and it’s been fabulous! The console is so versatile, robustly solid, and has a consistently clear and beautiful sound.”

    The artist’s latest trek sold out nearly every show and included stops at L.A.’s The Forum, NYC’s Madison Square Garden, Atlanta’s State Farm Arena, and Sacramento’s Golden 1 Center. For the tour leg, Pinzón’s FOH console was on an optical loop with two 56-in/24-out SD-Racks, each paired with an AES/EBU output card, and an SD-Nano Rack, fully loaded with 32-bit I/O modules. The Quantum338 was further equipped with a DMI-DANTE 64@96 card to provide digital PA system sends, while 64 channels coming from the racks served as an analog backup. The console’s second card slot housed a DMI-WAVES module for running the Waves backup system, “since I run the main one from the native Waves port that comes with the console,” he notes. Both recording and virtual soundcheck were accomplished over BNC via a DiGiGrid MGR MADI-to-SoundGrid interface supplying 128 channels of 96kHz audio to a REAPER digital audio workstation.

    “Having mixed on many DiGiCos, I have to say that Quantum’s sonic difference is quite noticeable, and I absolutely love the Mustard processing and Spice Rack!” Pinzón enthuses. “I’ve found that applying Mustard on my most important input channels gives me the ability to be more precise and create solutions that weren’t possible before, like doing one parallel compression per channel, for example. And as for the Spice Rack, I enjoy using it to make changes on certain channels that I have customized for specific songs and then control those changes through my snapshots. Even though I still complement my mixing with some ‘small brushstrokes’ of Waves, I predominantly use the console’s onboard processing for most things because it’s super-functional, very user-friendly, and sounds fantastic. The sonic quality of this console has allowed me to take my mix to another level.”

    While Pinzón manned approximately 90 input channels at the FOH position each night, monitor engineer German Tarazona worked his mixes from a remote bunker, given the artist’s use of a 360-degree stage. With the band occupying the four sunken pockets of an X-shaped stage, Tarazona utilized his Quantum338 to create 12 principal stereo IEM mixes for the singers and musicians, four stereo mixes for guests, two spare mixes for the band, and eight channels in a different frequency band for cities with heavy RF congestion, like Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.

    “This has been my first tour using DiGiCo, and I can tell you after 27 shows that it’s been the best change I could have made!” he says. “On previous tours, when Lucas was running an SD12, I was on another brand, which wasn’t ideal for unifying the overall sound. We’ve been hoping to move to the same type of console for a while now, and we finally found the right choice. We both wanted our artist to feel that his in-ear mix and the room mix are very similar, so he can enjoy his show to the maximum, and we’ve absolutely achieved that now with the Quantum338 desks.”

    Tarazona calls out new Quantum features like Nodal Processing and True Solo as perfect examples for why he’s been so pleased. “Those two tools are a game-changer for me as a monitor engineer—being able to deliver different sounds from the same instrument to the musicians makes my mixing experience very enjoyable. And the Spice Rack is amazing too. I have inserted my playback tracks into it, which sounds great and helps me to preserve the dynamics of my sequences.”

    The ability to have a dedicated talkback on each mix is “very agile,” he reports. “I don’t need to make multiple assignments, and everything is designed to give me quick access to the musicians. Speaking of which, I use the wide option on the stereo channels to enhance the stereo image in the IEMs, as well as different types of reverbs in order to provide wonderfully warm-sounding mixes.”

    In addition to his two SD-Racks loaded with 32-bit I/O cards, Tarazona also has an SD-MiNi Rack in his insert rack for analog inserts. Two AES/EBU cards facilitate connection with four Bricasti effects units to “provide spatiality in my artist’s in-ears,” while two analog cards interface with the vocal processors: a Rupert Neve Designs Shelford Channel and Portico 5045 for “reducing the ambiance on the microphones,” he describes. Like the FOH desk, the DiGiCo monitor console is also equipped with a DMI-WAVES card. “Although I have some plugins and external processors ready to use, I haven’t really used them much. The sound of this new console is far superior to what I was using before and I have found in the Quantum338 every solution to my needs.”

    Both engineers agree that virtual soundcheck has been a fundamental tool for the tour. “Due to the technical complexity of the setup, we do not have a regular soundcheck—only a line check before the show,” Pinzón notes. “So when I want to correct something or make an improvement to the mix of a certain song, I pull up the virtual soundcheck of the previous show, run through the snapshots, then calmly work them until I find the right result. That’s a tremendous help.”

    The 1000-nit brightness, size, and viewing angle of the Quantum338 screens are also a welcome improvement from other desks the duo have used. “Even for outdoor shows, these consoles are very comfortable and easy to work on—the sun never bothers us anymore,” he says. “In fact, it really lights up the beauty of these boards. That blue is gorgeous.”

    In early March, Maluma will take his Papi Juancho Tour to Europe and the UK, followed by later dates in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere around the world. “We’ll be taking our DiGiCo consoles everywhere with us,” Pinzón adds. “After a long mandatory stop due to the pandemic, we’re more than happy to be back on the road, and our Quantum consoles are ready and eager to work too!”

    For more details on Maluma’s upcoming performances, visit www.maluma.online.

  • DiGiCo’s Quantum338 Is a Boon for The Blessing USA Tour with Kari Jobe and Cody Carnes

    DiGiCo’s Quantum338 Is a Boon for The Blessing USA Tour with Kari Jobe and Cody Carnes

    NASHVILLE, Tenn. – One of the most highly anticipated tours in the Contemporary Christian music world this year is The Blessing USA Tour, pairing six-time GMA Dove Award winner Kari Jobe and husband/partner Cody Carnes. Kicking off in Pittsburgh on April 15 and culminating in Brandon, Mississippi on June 18, the tour is taking the celebrated singer-songwriter duo on a 24-city run of shows at large houses of worship and theaters across the Midwest and South, including Dallas, Orlando, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Houston and elsewhere.

    Sponsored by illumiNations and CovidSafeChurch.com, the tour is implementing “socially distanced and/or reserved COVID-safe seating and capacities” in each venue, and tour members will be tested and everyone entering will be temperature checked, in addition to other standards and local requirements. What’s also unique about this tour is how the DiGiCo Quantum338 console, operated by Production Manager Brenton Miles and supplied by tour outfitters Spectrum Sound, Inc. and IPS Live, is acting as the literal hub of every aspect of the tour’s sound.

    Miles is at the center of that hub. He’s mixing the show’s front-of-house sound as well as the in-ear monitors for the entire band, as well as for a 10-person VIP group that can access the stage, band, artists and crew in each city before the show. These are mainly volunteers and staffers from local churches that Miles and other The Blessing USA crewmembers will walk and talk through the tour’s workflows and equipment. The Quantum338 gets plenty of attention because those VIP attendees are on their own in-ears before and during the show on a completely separate mix within the Q338. “If a church’s keyboard player is in the VIP group, our keyboard player will come out and to talk to them about their setup, or if they’re a tracks person, we’ll go through our tracks rig with them,” he says. “They can have a Q&A with everyone.”

    The DiGiCo Quantum338 console, operated by Production Manager Brenton Miles and supplied by tour outfitters Spectrum Sound, Inc. and IPS Live, is the hub of the tour’s sound.

    Miles says he’s using nearly all of the 56 channels on the DiGiCo SD-Rack, and everything is directly split, double-patched in the console, to avoid latency in the monitors. “Everything also has its own section on the console surface, which is part of why I love this desk so much—the flexibility is incredible,” he explains. “I have all my control groups in the center, along with the 24×24 matrix that includes the 10 VIPs’ mix; all of my front-of-house input channels on the left, and all of my ears on the right including 10 channels of RF onstage. Everything has its place and I know where everything is, which is critical for speed when you’re wearing this many hats on a show. And that’s important, because it’s just me. I’m the only audio guy out there.”

    And there are even more hats: Miles is also taking in all of the inputs from the console to Pro Tools and Waves Tracks Live to record select shows, and audio for some promotional and sponsor videos before and during the show, also routed through the main PA. “It’s not just that I can route all of these audio sources, but also that I can manage them, too,” he says, noting that none of the audio for the promo video goes into the stage or VIP in-ears even as it’s playing through the PA systems in the house. But the VIPs are able to hear all the talk-backs on stage, the click, the guide tracks, and basically whatever the band hears onstage. “The matrix on the console is amazing in what it lets me do, and that’s important because the flow of our stage show is not locked to a grid. It can change on a dime; at any moment we can go to a different song,” he says. “In fact, Kari and Cody both have Sennheiser talk-backs on their handhelds, so they can literally flip a switch and talk to the band on stage through the monitors. With the Quantum338, I can make the matrix do everything we need to make that kind of communication happen.”

    Miles says his introduction to the Quantum338 was at Spectrum Sound’s Nashville shop, where he spent a day familiarizing himself with it before tour rehearsals began, and where he discovered how it would impact his workflow positively. “The quickness of the layouts, the three 17-inch multitouch screens, the brightness of those screens—all of that helps you keep focus during a show,” he says, also pointing out features like soft quick-select buttons displayed on each screen, and the 38 100mm touch-sensitive faders laid out in three blocks of 12 fader banks, plus two dedicated user-assignable faders, each with high resolution metering.

    Then there is the new “Ultimate Stadius” 32-bit ADC and DAC conversion, which is built into the Quantum338 as standard, alongside six single or three redundant MADI connections, dual DMI slots, and a built-in UB MADI USB recording interface. “We do everything in stereo, and my channel count is nearly maxed out, but there’s never a sense that you’re working near the edge of the console,” he says. “Even the little things, like double-layered scribble strips on the channels, so you can read the entire label—those kinds of little but important touches really make a difference on a show. DiGiCo took a real big step forward with the Quantum338. And I really don’t want to give it back to Spectrum when this tour’s done,” he says with a laugh.

    For more details on The Blessing USA Tour, visit www.karijobe.com. Spectrum Sound, Inc. can be found online at www.spectrumsound.net.

  • Living Word Christian Center’s Services Come Alive on New DiGiCo Quantum338

    Living Word Christian Center’s Services Come Alive on New DiGiCo Quantum338

    BROOKLYN PARK, Minn. – Forty years ago, Mac and Lynne Hammond stood before a gathering of a mere dozen individuals in a small meeting room at the Radisson Hotel in Plymouth, Minnesota, marking the foundation of Living Word Christian Center (LWCC). Today, the church’s membership is going on 10,000, and the much larger congregation now meets in a beautiful church with a 3,000-seat, fan-shaped sanctuary on 75th Avenue in nearby Brooklyn Park.

    Audio Logic Systems installs new FOH console, and upgrades SD8 monitor desk with ST Optics

    With the exponential rise in membership and expansion of facilities have come increased production requirements, which prompted LWCC to upgrade its FOH mix position with a new DiGiCo Quantum338 mixing console paired with an SD-Rack equipped with 32-bit ADC/DAC cards and ST Optics. Locally-based integrator Audio Logic Systems supplied and installed the new gear, as well as simultaneously upgraded the church’s existing DiGiCo SD8-24 monitor console’s SD-Rack with ST fiber-optic connectors, putting both consoles and SD-Racks on an Optocore loop.

    “We hold four services each week, and our music style here is Contemporary, along the lines of Jesus Culture, Bethel, and Elevation,” LWCC Lead Audio Engineer Scott Fahy describes. “The band generally consists of drums, bass, electric and acoustic guitar, one or two keyboards, and Ableton tracks, with four to six vocalists leading out, so, on average, our weekly channel count is around 35 inputs, give or take a few. However, for special events, we may add a Hammond B3, five horns, a string section, eight to ten more vocalists and, hopefully at some point, we’ll be able to have our choir sing again. So we really needed a console that could better accommodate our increasing channel count.”

    DiGiCo
    LWCC’s worship team sounds better than ever with the new Q338 console

    Fahy shares mixing time on the new Q338 with another individual who is no stranger to the DiGiCo platform—Robert “Cubby” Colby, a locally-based FOH audio engineer that has worked with Prince, Britney Spears, Phil Collins/Genesis, Shakira, Juanes and many other top names in popular music. He has been volunteering to help mix at LWCC for three years now, on and off, as his touring schedule has permitted. As a longtime user of DiGiCo consoles—particularly the large-format SD7 and SD5—Colby says that he was immediately wowed by the new Quantum console.

    “I was immediately taken by the three 17-inch screens and meterbridge hood—it’s a beautiful-looking and beautiful-sounding console,” Colby enthuses. “Having 38 faders on the top layer gives you a great handle knowing you will be able to arrange your ‘go-to’ inputs, returns, control groups and subgroups in any fashion. It’s amazing what two more faders on that layer can do for you! As to what you’re used to seeing on the SD-Range, the layout is very similar and familiar. The faders and knobs are different but still perfectly accurate. DiGiCo has also added 32-bit converters to local mic/line and the eight local line outputs, which is sweet!”

    “In addition to what you are used to having available dynamics-wise, the new Spice Rack and Mustard processing offer classic and vintage VCA compressors, and two others, plus a couple of new preamplifiers. You can also have odd/even harmonics, crunch, and more. There are a plethora of different options with dynamics to choose from, including the Chilli 6 dynamic EQ, which is particularly helpful when we have guest speakers that bring in their own headset or lav mics. There are so many amazing tools in the Quantum toolbox that we don’t need to use any outboard gear at all. And if you somehow don’t find what you need in the new tools, you always can go back to what your favorite options were from the SD-Range desks that are still present on this new platform.”

    Last year, prior to the new console going into LWCC, Colby had the opportunity to spend some time behind another Q338, which helped him mull over an audio solution for the church’s sanctuary and video-streamed broadcast mixes. “Living Word does both mixes from the same console,” he says. “My objective was to use the new Nodal Processing feature to tweak any chosen input so it wouldn’t change in the sanctuary, but have the ability to change EQ, dynamics and EFX for the online mix. I put together a demo from tracks that I had recorded at LWCC, and I used two sets of speakers to emulate the sanctuary and online mixes. I listened to the sanctuary mix with ADAM Audio A7X studio monitors and a sub to give it the full-range sound of the room, while the online speakers were super-small to emulate more of what most of the listeners online are using, such as an iPad, laptop or phone. I was able to demonstrate the Nodal Processing feature very well this way and how we could approach the issue of one engineer generating two separate mixes. For instance, it’s easy to identify the low-end instruments with the full-range sanctuary mix, but they would fall too far back on the online mix, so I would re-EQ/dynamics these instruments with Nodal Processing to pull them forward and be more present on the online mix.”

    “Another good example is that vocals are often too far forward on the online mix because, with praise and worship mixes, you want to have those vocals out front in the sanctuary,” he continues. “The congregation is there to participate in the singing of all these messages. So I set up a stereo aux mix, which allowed me to make baby steps in getting this better balance between room versus online better. The online mix is post-fader, which tracks everything I’m doing in the room. I would listen to the online mix and dial back the aux bus on different inputs to build what is now a much more consistent online mix. The same holds true for the acoustic-only inputs in the room, like the grand piano and drumkit. Everything else is direct. There are times where we have a five- or six-piece horn section or a string section. This would apply to these instruments as well. And being able to utilize the panning within the stereo aux buss was beneficial to the online mix, too.”

    Fahy and Colby both report that the new Q338 console is performing very well for them. With the sanctuary loudspeaker system configured as an LCR setup, Colby asked Fahy if he could come up with a macro setup that would allow him to take the vocals—anywhere from two to twelve, as it changes every weekend—and toggle each one of them between a lead vocal control group or a background control group, so Fahy built macros for this purpose. “Each RF mic is assigned a macro, which is very clever,” says Colby. “I think it would be fair to say that we all noticed the sonic difference immediately. With True Solo, I’m able to put headphones on and have a more accurate sense of my online mix in real time and make adjustments to that mix and the Nodal Processing.”

    Colby adds that products can only be truly great if the people that design, build, service and support them are just as reliable, and to that end he gives DiGiCo top marks. “I just keep getting blown away by DiGiCo’s support, which goes above and beyond at all time—no one else even comes close. Matt, Kyle, Ryan and Trevor at Group One [DiGiCo’s US distributor] and the team in London and around the world have fielded every question or concern, and the best part is that they respond within minutes. This has been my experience since their inception—bravo! And Audio Logic Systems did an outstanding job with the install. John Markiewicz and the ALS team were very generous with their time and opening their shop to LWCC and me to let us be better prepared for the changeover, and the whole process has been a seamlessly smooth and beautiful sounding experience.”

    For more info on Living Word Christian Center, visit www.lwcc.org. Audio Logic Systems can be found online at www.audiologicsystems.com.