Now in its 29th year, the Brit Awards took over London’s Earls Court on February 18th to bring the UK its most publicised music awards events. Hosted by Kylie Minogue and Gavin & Stacey stars James Corden and Mathew Horne, the evening saw performances from Coldplay, Duffy, Estelle and the Ting Tings, Pet Shop Boys, Girls Aloud, Kings Of Leon, Take That and U2.

 

Britannia Row employed sound designer Derrick Zieba to design a flip flop FOH and monitor set-up to maintain fluidity in the changeovers between the live acts. The bands’ engineers mixed their songs on one of the Digico D5 or Digidesign Venue consoles provided for the event. The consoles were both connected to the stage via a MADI bridge, a new system used this year that allowed the FOH boards to be placed 150 metres away from the stage. 

 

This flip flop philosophy was also implemented in the monitor world, where Yamaha’s DME64N digital mix engine was used as a monitor mix matrix. The DME64N enabled the monitor engineers to access all monitor settings, allowing monitor channels to be switched between either of the two desks via the Yamaha unit.

 

Over 20 Turbosound TFM450s were used for monitoring, powered by Crown amplifiers and mixed on additional D5 and Venue consoles. Playback and presenters’ audio was handled by a Yamaha PM5D.

 

The live audience at Earls Court listened to the show through 48 of EV’s XLine series Xvls cabinets. Of these, nine Xvlt cabinets were used for downfill with 20 EV X-subs in place to handle the low end. In addition to the EV speakers, Outline’s Butterfly array was used as infill. The entire system was controlled from FOH using EV’s IRIS-Net communication control software on the NetMax Digital Matrix System.

 

Sennheiser provided microphones and in-ear monitoring systems for the awards, its seventh year working with The Brits. Britannia Row also provided its new Sennhiser SKM 5200 microphones with Neumann KK 105 heads for Kylie Minogue and the other presenters, while on the performance stages Take That used SKM 5200 with KK 105 heads. The Ting Tings chose e935 wired mics, Kings of Leon used their e945 wired mics and the lovely ladies of Girls Aloud used their custom SKM 935 radio mics.

 

Britannia Row said it was a flawless event, with no reported problems or complaints from any of the divas and rock stars performing on the night. The only reported diva behaviour was from U2, who brought in two of their own Digico SD7 consoles and a monitor set-up. Perhaps the aging rockers needed the system to be extra loud.
www.britanniarow.com