TORONTO — Front of house engineers Connor Sharpe and Joel Livesey built their custom playback rig for a gig at the Juno Awards and it’s still going strong, having seen them through several NHL, NFL and CFL broadcasts and the closing ceremonies of last year’s Pan Am Games in Toronto.
The pair, who met three years ago while working a Tragically Hip tour, have partnered on projects ever since. Livesey explains the decisions they made when it came time to build the system: “We knew reliability was going to be our #1 priority, with flexibility being a very close second. We wanted computers with extremely lightweight operating systems running as few processes as possible, so we ended up using a heavily modified version of Snow Leopard (10.6.8). Then came the challenge of assembling five MacBook Pros — early/late 2011/2012 are our favorite,” notes Livesey.
“For converters, we are huge fans of Metric Halo, for both audio quality and again reliability. The system currently has pairs of Metric Halo’s ULN-8’s and LIO-8’s running into two Radial Engineering SW8 auto-switchers, giving us 16 channels of redundant playback. We also like the SW8s for their reliability. We have more than 500 shows with various bands on the original SW8 mkI as well as SW8 mkII’s deployed on all our current tours. There’s also two Radial 8OX’s in our rack in case we want to split the outputs, which increases our flexibility.”
With any intricate production — particularly those involving broadcasting, things can become complex fairly quickly. “For the Toronto 2015 Pan Am and Para Pan Am ceremonies, we were required to feed SMPTE time code to all the other departments (40-plus time code counters!), as well as some proprietary signals, so using the SW8 by keying the auto-gate with SMPTE (LTC) seemed like a perfect marriage. Having the desktop/footswitch remotes (Radial JR-2’s) added additional options for switching between systems and was a huge feature.”
It all comes down to synchronicity and timing. “Everything is locked with 30-frame, non-drop SMPTE time code, which also triggers the majority of lighting and video inside the venue. For Pan Am, we also ran Whamwave, FSK, and other time code sources for pyro/fireworks etc.”
For more info about Radial Engineering, go to www.radialeng.com.
