Capital Sound Hire is one of the latest companies to invest in DiGiCo’s new SD7 mixing console. The desk will first be used on the Kylie Minogue European Arena tour, which starts in May and celebrates 20 years in the music industry for the diminutive Australian.
According to Paul Timmins, Project Manager at Capital Sound, “we already have a good inventory of DiGiCo consoles and products, so we would have naturally added an SD7 to this in 2008. We were specifically asked to provide one for the Kylie tour we are undertaking and so we have invested a little earlier than planned.”
Timmins, a 20-year audio veteran who joined Capital in 2000, has Kylie’s last world tour under his belt, so knows what will be expected of the SD7. “It’s still a little early to comment about specifics regarding the desk as we are yet to put it through its paces on a tour, but we are very happy with our purchase,” said Timmins. “It’s been an easy transition from using the existing technology, which is always great and I personally like the video screen!”
Capital Sound Hire has a policy of continuously monitoring and investing in new stock to ensure it can provide high-end equipment to suit any job requirement, so the SD7 acquisition was logical. “The service and back up we receive from DiGiCo is amazing,” adds Timmins. “This is why we had no hesitation to add this high end console to our stock.”
The SD7 is DiGiCo’s most recent advance in high density digital processing and is centred around the all-new Stealth mixing and routing engine. Based on the latest incarnation of FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) technology, known as Super FPGA, it is a core component of the SD7 and heralds a quantum leap in console design.
Allied to three of the latest generation of SHARC ® effects and control processors, it endows the console with a staggering eight times the overall processing power of existing technology. The benefits are to be found not only in the high resolution audio processing that makes 128 simultaneous 192kHz signal paths readily achievable, or 256 at 48kHz/96kHz, but limitless flexibility too.
Capital Sound will be making the most of 448 simultaneous optical, 224 MADI and 24 analogue and AES/EBU connections, plus 128 busses, 32 matrix busses and 32 graphic equalisers, to make this Kylie tour the best sounding ever, which will be reported on in the coming months’ trade magazines.
“To have one of the first SD-7 consoles out with Capital and the Kylie crew is an honour,” says James Gordon, DiGiCo’s managing director. “Having worked with Paul, Chris Pyne [FOH engineer] and Rod Mattheson [monitor engineer] for the last few years on D5’s, a lot of their suggestions have made it into the SD7 and it’s great to see them being used as intended .”
