INNOVASON on tour with Golden Oldies

  There’s no doubt about it, nostalgia is big business in France, as it is the world over. Age Tendre et Têtes de Bois, now in its third gloriously successful year having been one of the most profitable French tours of 2007, is back on the road again, filling up to arena-sized venues the length and breadth of France. Full service production company, Mag Scène in St Etienne is once again providing all the audio equipment for the tour including an Sy80 digital mixing console from INNOVASON to handle monitors.

Monitor engineer, Matthieu Speck, is more than happy with the performance of the Sy80. “Age Tendre is a pretty complex show with seventeen artists performing one after the other and finally all together during the course of a four-hour show,” explained Mattheiu. “I therefore needed a console capable of handling a maximum of inputs and outputs, but I wanted as small a footprint as possible. Once I’d tried an Sy80, there was no going back – I loved the concept of how the console worked, and was very impressed by how quick and easy it is to set up, which is really important when you’re on tour.”

“I’ve got one hundred input channels, twelve stereo in-ear mixes, four monitor mixes and five effects sends,” he continued. “I use a DioCore which contains the sixty-four mic preamps and a Mix Box containing the new effects card, which sounds wonderful. I use three reverbs and two other internal effects. The thing I love about this console is the warmth of the sound and the low frequency definition which you can really appreciate with the new three-way in-ear monitors.”

“Something else I’ve done is to split all of the musicians’ input channels depending on whether they are going to in-ears or stage monitors. Everything that is destined for the musicians in-ears is in ‘safe’ mode whereas the signal  going to the artistes’ stage monitors is on recall for each song, which saves me a huge amount of time. The ten HF microphones and effects returns are simply patched onto input channels, also in recall mode of course. As a result, I’m using one hundred of the 104 inputs available! I’m also using the SmartFAD system to great advantage to enable me to manage the 100 inputs with just forty-four faders, and all without layers.... in fact, the faders designated as SmartFAD faders act as a VCA on the rest - this feature alone makes the desk worth its weight in gold!”