SEATTLE, WA – Neumo's Crystal Ball and Reading Room recently purchased a Soundcraft 48-input Si2 console with 24 monitor sends from K. Berry Associates, which also provided the club's other sound and lighting systems. Plus 4 Marketing sold the Si2 console to K. Berry Associates.
Neumo's offers customers a restaurant, Pike Street Fish Fry; a pub, Moe Bar; and a VIP room. But the concert hall side of the business is its priority, with advanced lighting production, a new sound system and a music calendar that has recently included artists as The Shins, Vampire Weekend, The Raconteurs, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Feist, Connor Oberst And The Mystic Valley Band, Super Furry Animals, The Avette Brothers and others.
Kelly Berry, president of K. Berry Associates and designer of the sound system, noted that these and other artists have become reliant on PMs, and lots of them. "Where before you might have needed a few outputs for stage monitors, today you need as many as a dozen individual monitor mixes for multiple band members, and for as many as three different bands every night," he said. "The musicians have come to expect that capability." The search for a new monitor console took time; it was first decided that only a digital console would fit the bill. "A traditional analog console simply can't handle that many outputs," Berry said.
The Soundcraft Si2 was chosen over several competing digital mixers. "The recall capability of the Si2 is incredible," said Kelly. "Soundchecks go quicker and more productively and there's no resetting the board between acts – they just hit the recall button and the monitors are ready to go."
Berry added that the console's other features helped clinch the sale, including 24 group/aux busses available at all times, eight matrix busses and a full complement of monitor talkback and main bus outputs – as well as the fact that every input and output on the Si2 has its own dedicated input socket on the back of the console. The Si2 also uses a combination of rotary encoders and OLED screens on every channel so the engineer mixes at the source, without having to refer to a central screen.
In addition, four assignable on-board Lexicon effect engines supplement four stereo inputs. "The installation was a breeze," Berry added. "The Si2 fits in the same footprint as a typical analog console – it doesn't need a stand-alone computer, and the learning curve was not steep at all – the club's mixers were up and running on it within a half-hour of seeing it for the first time. We know it's already made a huge difference in how well the monitoring performs at Neumo's because the bands tell us so, and they're the ones you have to please."
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