Australia’s youngest D1 owner, Tom Allen, recently took possession of a brand new DiGiCo D5 56-EX-Live digital mixing console to add to his existing DiGiCo D1 console. This now gives Tom the title of the world’s youngest D5-Live owner, an impressive feat for this Daylesford-based owner-operator and monitor engineer. Tom’s production company (Parradiddle Productions) is a specialised DiGiCo console hire service, with an inventory to service the international broadcast, theatre and concert touring industry. It provides the DiGiCo D1 or DiGiCo D5 in a variety of configurations, depending on specific requirements.
Even though Tom had the D1 in his inventory he still took the effort to compare the D5 to all other live digital mixing consoles in that class and chose the D5 based on quality, portability, flexibility and its ease-of-use. Tom has this to say about the D5, “The technology doesn’t distract you from your creativity, and this applies to the whole range of products from DiGiCo”.
Tom says, “Broadcast engineers get excited by the fact that the 112 channel optic fibre multicore is the thickness of a mic lead (proving weight and space friendly) and allows the signal to be free from interference and noise over long distances, additionally, old school engineers are amazed at the ease-of-use with the DiGiCo range. You don’t want to get on a new piece of equipment and have to reinvent the wheel. By having such a console, with its architecture relevant to an analogue console, all engineers I’ve trained have had excellent results, due to its simplistic yet versatile nature”.
Tom has also positive things to say regarding the recording options for DiGiCo saying, “The option to record directly from the MADI ports of DiGiCo range is impressive. I also recently acquired a recording system on a Mac platform, capable of recording 112 channels directly from the MADI I/O on the D1 or the D5, completely uninterrupted from the mic pre’s. There is no extent to which I can’t record in a live environment with this combination of technology”. Adding, “The recording aspect has taken a lot of acts by surprise. The fact that an act as large as the MSO can record from this in a live environment has impressed many artists and engineers.”
And as for his role as monitor engineer, Tom also sings praise to the functionality of the D5, saying, “Mix consistency, it’s excellent for monitors. Being a monitor engineer, the DiGiCo desks have put a lot of hassles to rest with some neat functions, such as snapshot recall and flexibility throughout the entire DiGiCo range with the one session file. It’s great.”
Parradiddle Productions is based in Daylesford and can be contacted by telephone on 03 5348 2534.
