NEW YORK — In an increasingly common instance of Studer Vista 5 SR live sound consoles being deployed by leading sound engineers at front-of-house and monitor position for the same event, Keith Urban’s FOH engineer Steve Law and monitor engineer Jason Spence both manned Studer Vista 5 SR consoles at the recent NFL Live Kickoff concert in New York City’s Columbus Circle as part of CLAIR’s support package for the award-winning country music artist.
The concert was hosted by Deion Sanders and featured live performances by Usher and Natasha Bedingfield in addition to Keith Urban, with guest appearances by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NFL greats Lawrence Taylor and Warren Sapp.
Traffic at this usually busy junction in the heart of New York City was suspended for the day as Firehouse Productions and CLAIR collaborated to transform the streetscape into a temporary outdoor concert venue. New York-based Firehouse Productions, who provided stage and control electronics gear, fielded a team led by senior engineer Mark Dittmar.
Firehouse supported the main stage with JBL VerTec VT4889 full-size line array elements in towering arrays on either side of the stage, while Mike Wolf, CLAIR’s corporate services manager, led a team onsite that relied on the company’s own proprietary JBL-loaded i-3 and i-4 line array enclosures for extended audience-area coverage and delay tower positions.
“We had 61 inputs for the concert, playing eight songs over about 45 minutes,” Spence says. “And because we brought in our tour’s preprogrammed Vista 5 SRs, we were able to interface with the local production via analogue splits or digital splits right off the desk.”
Working at front-of-house with Keith Urban, Steve Law is an early adopter of the Vista 5 SR. “I have always been one for taking risks on new technology to give it a run and see what it will do,” Law said. “The preamps are great, the signal path is great and there’s no latency so that by the time the audio signal gets to the speakers, what you’re putting in is what’s coming out. There are so many consoles that don’t do that, especially lower-dollar digital consoles that host a ton of external plug-ins to try and compensate and you end up losing everything.”
ACTION ITEM:
For more information, please visit www.studer.ch/
