A Digidesign Paradiso

News

Andy Wood May 15 2008, 9:00am

Amsterdam venue upgrades with Digidesign VENUE D-Show consoles and Pro Tools|HD system

Following an audio upgrade to embrace line array technology, the technical team at Amsterdam’s legendary Paradiso Club has now extended the upgrade to incorporate the digital domain into the venue via products from Digidesign.

Paradiso Club technical manager Milan Jelicics and senior soundman Patrick Boonstra led an extensive evaluation process which identified a system designed around the Digidesign VENUE live sound environment. The facility’s new system features a VENUE D-Show control surface at the FOH position, and a compact D-Show Profile for monitor mixing.

The complete Digidesign package, which also includes system racks, expansion cards, cabling, and a Pro Tools|HD system — a package worth €150,000 — was supplied by Digidesign’s Benelux VENUE distributor, Ampco Belgium.

“This is a highly prestigious location for our first D-Show installation in Holland," states Ampco Belgium’s managing director, Stef de Pooter, (pictured, left, with Milan Jelicics, centre, and Digidesign's Mike Case). “The Paradiso is an excellent showcase for our product, and other live venues will take note of the system’s full recording and playback potential — particularly the Pro Tools TDM plug-ins and Pro Tools|HD integration.”

For de Pooter, the installation marked the successful conclusion of a 12-month collaboration with Paradiso to find just the right solution. “I organised demos and invited sound engineers to work with the desk over a period. Flexibility and accessibility were important factors, since the Paradiso’s programme varies widely from DJs to spoken word to heavy metal. It was important that they had the opportunity to operate the system under all circumstances to see how easy it is to learn.”

This hands-on experience made it easier for Jelicics to formulate his decision, and he duly placed the order. “We heard good things about VENUE and bought these systems with the future in mind, and because, by comparison, they sound better than the other desks we listened to,” Jelicics explains. “We knew that going from analogue to digital was a major step, but we could hear the difference straight away — and some of our technicians already loved it because of the Pro Tools support.”

With the 24-fader D-Show and D-Show Sidecar expander at front-of-house, the Paradiso has the capacity for 64 inputs via two Stage Racks (48 inputs in the first and 16 in the second), plus 16 local inputs and outputs in the FOH Rack. The FOH Rack also includes an HDx interface card, which provides up to 64 tracks of Pro Tools recording and playback via direct connection to the club’s new ProTools|HD 2 Accel system. “We had a 48-channel analogue desk, but the 64-input Stage Rack gives us huge advantages,” Jelicics says. “Bands today require 40 channels or more, and they don’t want to share any channels, even with the support band.”

The beauty of the new VENUE system is that sound engineers can send their patch list ahead as an exported HTML document, and have their show file prepared in advance on a USB stick. “With 800 programmes a year, and with three bands often playing one or more nights, this is a huge bonus,” Jelicics says.

The club’s FOH setup also includes the VENUE All-Access Pack, a core collection of TDM plug-ins, while a standard VENUEPack is in use in the monitor position.

Boonstra is also delighted that Ampco Belgium included Digidesign’s Personal Q (PQ) monitor system in the package. “This will enable us to send left/right stereo mixes with 40 outputs instead of the 16 we had before — with all our dynamics on all channels; this is such an advantage.”

Ampco Belgium supplied the complete racking and coax/BNC cabling package — as well as a Glyph back-up hard drive system so that engineers can simply plug in their drives. For broadcast applications, the company facilitated a separate breakout on XLR using Socapex 337 — a transformer-balanced multi-connector, which is [Dutch broadcaster] NOB broadcast standard.

Jelicics admits that recording requirements were a key issue, with many “Live at the Paradiso” sessions appearing on Fabchannel.com — a private Dutch company that films concerts at the Paradiso for bands. In the past, Paradiso also used DutchView’s mobile truck to multitrack recordings. But now Jelicics says “we have our own studio, and now we can send mixes straight from the Stage Rack to our own studio. The potential for DVD and Internet recordings is immense.”

And so begins a gradual phasing out of the Paradiso’s old analogue consoles, which will eventually go into storage as the digital requirement becomes universal on technical riders.

The final word comes from Boonstra: “This is just a beautiful new toy with a lot of logical things happening. The first moment I stood behind the VENUE system it felt good. It has allowed us to change from being a hall where bands were afraid to come without production, to one where they can be totally confident.”

digidesign.com/venue.