Summertime... and the listening is easy – with INNOVASON at Jazz à Vienne
July 2009
The pioneering French jazz festival is now on its third generation of digital consoles from French console maker, INNOVASON, as Eclipse makes its festival debut.
Well, it all depends on your point of view, of course, but the thing about jazz is that there is usually something for everyone. It was certainly the case at the 29th Jazz a Vienne festival held from 27th June – 10th July in the charming southern French town of Vienne. Some 30kms south of Lyon, Vienne stretches out languorously along the beautiful east bank of the Rhone.
Picturesque in the extreme, the main venue for the 2-week jamboree is one of France’s national treasures, a vertiginous 13,000-seat Roman amphitheatre hewn out of the rock overlooking the town and the river.
This year’s line-up offered everything from gospel, soul, funk, blues, groove, in addition to every possible flavour of jazz you can think of. Headline acts this year included Randy Crawford, David Sanford, Barbara Hendricks, Gilberto Gil, the Harlem Jubilee Singers, and a tribute to Nina Simone presented by her daughter, Simone with participation from Diana Reeves, Lizz Wright and Angelique Kidjo. Oh, and Seal dropped in as well, as did the French rapper, MC Solar, and the Franco-Israeli folk singer Yael Naim.
However, whilst it’s true to say that the festival organisers pulled out all the stops to keep the musical line-up as fresh and interesting as possible, if there is one thing you don’t want to mess with at a jazz festival, it’s the sound. Never was the old adage so true – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! As a result, the improvements made year on year to the Jazz a Vienne set-up are incremental rather than ground-shifting. This is possibly because Jazz a Vienne was way ahead of the game at a very early stage, having made the decision as early as 2003 to “go digital” and use INNOVASON digital consoles. Lyon-based production company, La Boite a Son, now owned by events giant GL Events, supplied a first-generation Grand Live console which is still in active service today. The following year, festival sound designer and FoH engineer Jean Lyonnet brought in INNOVASON’s brand new flagship Sy80 desk to take pride of place at Front of House, and thus began the long-running association of Jazz a Vienne with INNOVASON and confirmation of their “digital” status.
It was only fitting, therefore, that Jazz a Vienne was the first major event at which INNOVASON’s all-new digital console, Eclipse, was used in anger. In fact, not one but two Eclipses were baptised at the festival: the first replaced last year’s Sy80 to handle monitors, and the second console taking full advantage of the new MARS onboard digital multitrack recording facility took the place of last year’s Sy48. Jean Lyonnet chose to hang onto his trusty Sy80 for FoH duties.
"Without a doubt, the biggest change this year was having an Eclipse for recording,” stated INNOVASON’s product manager and Eclipse guru, Hervé De Caro. “We were already ahead of the field last year by having a PC equipped with an LX6464E soundcard from Digigram for recording and playback facilities. This year, it’s all built into the console.” De Caro is referring to MARS, INNOVASON’s on-board digital 64-track recorder that records directly onto a hard disk plugged into the back of the console. According to Gilles Carrer, the recording engineer, “My job has never been so easy! Using the Eclipse to prepare the premixes for Radio France was a piece of cake – INNOVASON has made a lot of improvements in terms of access to certain functions, which has improved handling even further, but the real revolution was having the ability to record – and to manipulate the recording – at your fingertips. There is a navigation bar and a time code module that you can access directly from the control surface, or via the touchscreen, whichever suits you best. We didn’t actually use the Virtual Soundcheck mode for soundchecking as each artist only performed once, but once they found out that they could listen to their show exactly as it happened, the procession of people into my little underground cavern was non-stop! Another bonus was that we managed to get rid of two huge racks of gear, which was most appreciable.”
Denis Regnaud in monitor world also had a positive experience with Eclipse. “For a start, it’s physically much smaller than an Sy80, and that’s always a good thing in monitor land. Even though it was a brand new console for virtually all the engineers this year, it was simplicity itself to use. The shortcuts and direct access to certain functions are really well laid out and are genuine improvements. Everyone was up and running within five minutes, largely because it’s so easy to configure to suit the needs of the engineer. From that point of view, it’s a fabulous “festival” console because we can make it suit everyone. Personally I loved the SmartPanel. Like SmartFAD on the Sy80, it enables you to control your entire mix on a minimum number of faders, but SmartPanel gives you the option to designate certain functions to rotary knobs as well as faders. It was astonishingly easy, and we had some great comments from visiting engineers.”
In network terms, they’ve got it down to a fine art at Jazz a Vienne, so there’re really no need to reinvent the wheel each year. The inputs came from up to 48 channels of analogue mics and DIs, and 12 Neumann Solution-D digital mics. This year, both FOH and monitors had their own Innovason DioCore EtherSound-enabled stagebox on separate networks so that each could control his own gain. The Neumanns went via RME’s DMC-842 digital microphone interface (converting the signal from AES42 to AES-EBU) and then NetCIRA’s MS-88 Bi-Directional Master/Slave Unit (converting it from AES-EBU to EtherSound). The FoH DioCore took the signal from the EtherSound network, whilst the monitor DioCore was fed via AES-EBU. For those channels that did employ the Neumanns, therefore, the entire FOH signal chain was digital right up to the point where the XTA’s DP448 Digital PA System Controller delivered the FOH mix to the V-DOSC and dV-DOSC line arrays. The recording Eclipse took the Neumann feed from the FoH Diocore on the network, and the analogue mics on AES-EBU from its own dedicated stagebox.
According to festival sound designer and FoH engineer, Jean Lyonnet, the set-up for Jazz a Vienne is a true showcase for the possibilities of a digital system in a live sound environment. “We’ve got the best of both worlds here,” he remarked. “While there’s no doubt that digital consoles these days offer benefits in every situation, as does a digital network where possible, simply for reducing cabling, improving latency and getting rid of cumbersome multicores, we’re not yet at the stage where a digital microphone is necessarily the best choice for all types of music. Hence we’ve got both here at Jazz a Vienne, and it works extremely well, although you do have to know how to manage it in order to obtain coherent results. However, I think that so far we’ve managed it to great effect!”
