Colorado Symphony conducts DiGiCo upgrade
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In 2012, the City of Denver purchased a DiGiCo SD7 mixing console as part of a major audio facilities upgrade for Boettcher Concert Hall that also notably included a full L-Acoustics loudspeaker system. With productions growing increasingly complex and technically more demanding over the past seven years, the City once again chose to invest in DiGiCo - this time by upgrading its existing SD7 with a new Quantum engine.
For more than 15 years, Aric Christensen has served as Colorado Symphony’s head of audio. Seeing that he individually mics all of the orchestra’s instruments and typically runs upwards of 100 inputs on a standard show, DiGiCo’s flagship SD7 was his primary choice from the very start - as was the recent Quantum upgrade.
“As amazing as it might seem, we had actually started to outgrow our SD7,” he shares. “And really, without the SD7, some of our shows would never have been possible. To do as many inputs as we do at a sample rate of 96kHz, there’s really no other console out there that’s going to have the processing power and right MADI I/O to handle it. I also wanted to do Virtual Soundcheck of 96 channels at 96k, so I obviously needed a lot of ports to be able to accomplish that as well.”
The Colorado Symphony most frequently performs in Boettcher Concert Hall at the Denver Performing Arts Complex. The hall, built in 1978, is the country's first “in-the-round” concert hall. No audience member is more than 85ft from the stage, with more than 80 percent of the audience being seated within 65ft of the stage.
Along with the Quantum upgrade, Boettcher Concert Hall moved to an Optocore fibre-optic setup and added a large 56-input SD-Rack and 32-input SD-MiNi-Rack, the latter of which is fully equipped with input cards, bringing the venue’s rack-based input count up to 88. Two of those cards are the new Stadius Mic Pre-Amp modules supplying 16 total channels of 32-bit performance.
(Jim Evans)
