The River Centre

SFL's Mark Payne explains how we helped the River Centre overcome its many challenges facing the audio system in the Centre's main auditorium

The River Centre Tonbridge, Kent

I first met Ed Foxwell, the technical AV systems engineer at 'The River Centre', while teaching one of the Yamaha M7CL courses at SFL. It was here that he started to explain some of the challenges facing the audio system in the centre's main auditorium.

I visited the site on a consultancy basis and was able to identify a list of issues with the existing Nexo speaker system installation. It was badly aligned, and setup by the original installer and some of the speaker drivers were defective.

On my second appointment to the centre Ed and I were able to vastly improve the systems coverage. Prior to this, the bad design had left almost 30% of the seating area with no direct high frequency coverage. Nexo is good equipment but like anything in the world of audio, good speakers can be merely average within poor system planning and design.

Yamaha M7CL

As part of our ongoing relationship with 'The River Centre', SFL were pleased to have been awarded the contract to supply and install a new 48 channel Yamaha M7CL mixing console complete with an Alesis 48 channel digital HD recording system and interfaces for the M7CL

The Yamaha M7CL implements all of the system control that the centre needed in one package and so makes the outboard and processing redundant. Consequently, we were able to remove the old A&H GL3300, outboard compressors, gates and graphic EQs.

It also offers a 100% recallable system and mix setup. This is ideal for 'The River Centre's' multi role usage from a top flight conference centre in the week to large church on Sundays, requiring full contemporary music production.

During my visit and training with Ed and Jonathan, we generated some base line mixes for FOH and monitors by using a live evening session with the full church band. Ed and Jon swap roles taking turns as guitar/vocals in the band or at the FOH desk the base mix allows them total freedom. Sometimes they even both play, leaving the M7CL to mix sound without an operator!

Alesis Digital HD Recording

The M7CL can offer 48 channels of digital output and input via Yamaha MY16AT ADAT optical interface cards and TOSlink light pipes. SFL provided a recording and playback solution that is totally integrated to the live console allowing full 48 channel digital capture and playback.

As a training and development tool, the ability to capture the audio of an event is invaluable. After a sound check and rehearsal session, the whole band are able to come to the FOH position and listen to the recording being immediately played back with the same gain structure and energy as the live performance. While this is happening, the stage monitors run with the same levels and mixes to enable further discussion between the engineer and musicians.

Once the Yamaha mic preamps and AD convertors make the transition to digital, every channel gets recorded discretely at 48Khz with 24 bit resolution in the digital domain. We source the direct outs on each channel pre-eq and pre-insert (compressor and gates etc) so the channel recordings to HD are independent of the live mix.

During playback the channels are delivered back to the console at exactly the same level as they left so the transition from live input to digital input is seamless. You can re-patch all 48 channels at the recall of one scene without altering the rest of the mix and then carry on refining once the musicians have gone for tea. It's a miracle tool!

Want to Learn?

If you would like to learn more about how SFL could help you into the digital live age, call Mark Payne or Jamie Gosney on 0118 969 0900. You can also enrole on one of our courses. See www.sflgroup.co.uk and visit the training pages.