CHICAGO — Harpo Studios recently completed their multi-city Lifeclass tour stops in Toronto, New York and St. Louis. They produced two-hour live and two-hour taped talk shows featuring Oprah Winfrey, Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins, Iyanla Vanzant and Bishop T.D. Jakes.
One of the challenges from the Toronto stop was that the audio cabling from the Dome Productions broadcast truck to the stage was over 1,200 feet. To overcome this, the crew used three Roland Digital Snake Systems using Cat-5E and converting to fiber for the audio transmission.
Harpo Studios’ audio production manager Gerry Formicola reports that for most of their stops on the multi-city tour, cable limitation was not really an issue because the runs they had to work through were 100 meters or less. Their standard digital snake equipment for the tour employs the Roland (S-4000S, S-0808, S-0816 and S-1608) digital snakes, along with the S-4000M REAC Merge Unit and S-MADI REAC MADI bridge. By using standard fiber converters for the Toronto episodes, they were able to use the Roland gear exactly as they had at other locations — plug-and-play.
The crew relied upon three Roland snake-enabled systems, noted Harpo Studios’ audio director J.R. Chappell. An S-4000S-3208 digital snake fed the Calrec FOH console using the S-4000H interface and the broadcast truck using the S-MADI bridge. The second system implemented a pair of S-0808 snakes at each end, used for a separate set of lines back-and-forth for intercom purposes. 
The third digital snake system was an S-1608 and an S-0816, one in the truck and one backstage for miscellaneous audio feeds back-and-forth between the truck and the stage.
“We liked switching to digital when we were doing the remote shows,” said Chappell, noting how the Roland gear helped simplify cable runs. “Oftentimes, with analog snakes, we would have problems with hums and buzzes or bad lines, and going digital completely eliminated those issues. We plugged in, and everything worked the first time and sounded great.”
“We were able to get MADI straight out of the system, and integrate that directly into the Calrec consoles onboard the broadcast trucks,” added Formicola. He also appreciates that the Roland S-0808, S-0816, and S-1608 digital snakes are “small, lightweight, and easy to move to a location.” In addition, he reports, they’re “simple, straightforward and super-easy to use, cut down on remote show setup time, and makes troubleshooting non-existent.”
For more information, go to www.rolandsystemsgroup.com and http://www.oprah.com/oprahs-lifeclass/oprahs-lifeclass.html/.
