Glastonbury introduces the M-400

News

Andrew Low Jul 9 2008, 1:37pm

RSS M-400 used for FOH and monitors on the BBC Introducing Stage

Roland Systems Group (RSG) and South West Audio worked together at this year’s Glastonbury Festival. South West used RSS M-400 desks for FOH and monitor mixing on the BBC Introducing Stage and the RSS Digital Snake on the Park Stage.

RSG’s Peter Heath and Martin Thomas were also on hand to help mixing some of the unsigned bands on the M-400. “This gave us the ideal testing ground for Roland’s new M-400 digital console; essentially we had a festival situation with hardly any guest engineers,” explained South West’s Mark Bott. He also felt the boards Cat 5 connectability helped greatly to make the show run smoothly.

“The M-400 was really quick to set up, and we all felt that its worksurface was very intuitive and easy to use,” Bott explained. “In the context of its cost, you simply cannot go wrong. For the BBC stage, it was perfect and we really enjoyed using it, especially features like being able to offer 2-channel recording onto a USB stick. In other festival environments, with numerous guest engineers, there may be the usual issues of familiarities heard y but these will be solved with time and with training, as with any new digital console.

“At the BBC Introducing Stage, we had to fly the multicore and that was really simple,” said Bott. “At the Park Stage, our only options were to use cable ramps which would have had consequences for the budget, or to bury it. With the Digital Snakes, you vastly reduce the risks of an accident, such as someone putting a spade through the multicore, and it costs so little that we can just leave it buried after the event! And by running one extra cable, we can have full redundancy which gives us the confidence that the system is going to run, no matter what.”

More than 30 unsigned bands performed on the BBC stage. The performances are a showcase for unknown bands to get some festival exposure. The show was broadcast on the Internet, and all the bands, including headliners The Wombats, were filmed and recorded for future use.
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