MEDELLIN, Colombia — A DiGiCo SD8 is the latest mixing console purchased by Colombian company Grupo Hangar, which provides technical production services to events in and around the city of Medellín, including the Feria de las Flores (Festival of the Flowers), a high-profile, week-long event.
More details from DiGiCo (www.digico.org):
Grupo Hangar provides its services for live music, cultural festivals, sport, exhibitions, trade and fashion shows. The company needed a mixing console that could handle all of them and satisfy their policy of providing a custom solution for each one.
“We purchased the SD8 for a number of reasons,” says Grupo Hangar producer Santiago Vélez. “First of all it has a wonderful sound – not only in terms of the features to shape the sound, but just by bringing the faders up it sounds amazing. It’s also a very versatile desk; each session can be configured to each event’s needs, which allows engineers to work very comfortably. The FPGA technology makes it more stable and faster in its internal processing, which is very important when working with lots of channels and processing. The multiband compressors are also wonderful!”
The SD8 was quickly put to work on Medellín’s famous Feria de las Flores (Festival of the Flowers). The week-long festival is the city’s highest profile event, featuring a pageant, parades and much live music.
“I have found many more things about the SD8 that I like since I began working with it,” says Santiago. “The way that the desk can be adapted to my needs is amazing – the ability to move every fader or group of faders to wherever I need them and the concept of snapshots within the same session are great. But, most of all, I like the fact that there is no interruption to the audio when changing from one scene, preset, etc to another and the ability to change parameters softly with the programmable time feature.
“Overall, we are really pleased with the SD8. It is wonderful to use, it sounds great and there is nothing we’ve come across that we don’t like. It has been a great success, everyone who works on it falls in love with it!”
The hardware is only part of the story, though. Grupo Hangar is thousands of miles from DiGiCo’s UK headquarters, but Santiago is very pleased with the technical support he has received.
“Because we are the only company in Medellín with the SD8, I was worried that any problem with the desk could be a nightmare,” he says. “But DiGiCo have provided wonderful customer support and their staff have been very patient and helpful with any issues that I’ve had. I am very grateful for that.”
