NASHVILLE — Digital Console Rental, Inc. (DCR), founded by sound engineer Howard Jones in 2004, got its start with DiGiCo’s D5. The company, which now offers products for a range of touring artists, sound reinforcement companies and corporate events, recently added DiGiCo’s SD8 to its inventory.
“When we got started, being a new company, we wanted to come in with the hottest new piece of gear on the market,” recalled Jones, “and the DiGiCo D5 was the new bad-ass console on the block. Although 2004 was not that long ago, the only viable large frame digital desk at the time was the Yamaha PM1D, but it had been out for three or four years. The D5 epitomized what the whole digital desk concept was about. We established the company with the D5, so it made sense that when they came out with the SD8—a smaller, more affordable digital desk—we should move on to that as well.”
As a dry hire rental house, it was important that the DiGiCo desks had an online and offline editor so that acts that rent the desks for a run of shows could pre-program the desk using the DiGiCo RCE (Remote Control Editor) software.
“I just tell the engineer to download the program off of the DiGiCo Web site and they have all of the same controls of the desk on their laptop,” Jones said. “Because this is an online program as well as offline, the engineer can also put his laptop on the SD8 surface and use this as an additional ‘live’ screen with the SD8.
“The DiGiCo line as a whole is a great sounding line,” Jones added. “Some of the pluses with the SD8 are that you get a lot of the features of the bigger desks as well as retaining the audio quality. The SD8 offers a better value to our existing dyed-in-the-wool DiGiCo clients looking for a more affordable and compact digital offering to go up against the Digidesign Venue and Yamaha PM5D. One of the big improvements in the SD8 and SD7 over the D-series is there are no socket files to deal with. Also, having 12 channels per touch screen as opposed to 8 is definitely a move in the right direction.”
Jones also noted that “the ability for an engineer to be able to do high resolution Hard Disk Broadcast Wave file recording with a RME MADI-face, and do virtual soundcheck for $1,500 is a very powerful statement in itself.”
Moving forward, Jones and DCR are working with DiGiCo to help develop and expand the SD8 market, and to that end, they are opening an office in Austin, Texas at the new Soundcheck facility this fall.
For more information, go to: www.digitalconsolerental.com and www.digico.org
