Kevin Madigan, long-term Front of House engineer for 1960s folk-rock legends Crosby, Stills & Nash, has reaped the benefits of working in the digital domain for many years. Now, he has added a DiGiGrid MGB to his audio arsenal for their current world tour.
“I’ve worked with DiGiCo consoles for many years,” says Kevin, “First with a D5Live and now with the flagship SD7. I have an SD-Rack on stage that’s running at 96k that is pretty much at capacity and I’m utilizing optics on a redundant loop.”
The DiGiGrid MGB is a compact, portable interface that lets you plug any coaxial MADI-enabled device into the power of the Waves SoundGrid networking and processing platform. Adding it to Kevin’s already powerful console makes recording, processing and playback of up to 128 audio channels and using literally hundreds of Waves and third-party plugins, with super-low latency an absolute breeze, as Kevin has found out.
“Recording the shows is important for the band members,” he explains. “With the DiGiGrid MGB we’re able to record 64 channels over the MADI stream instead of the previous 56. And we’re now doing it at the higher resolution of 96k, rather than 48k.
“We have all the channels from the stage rack, all the band vocals and instruments, and various other things added into the MADI stream including a left /right reference mix for each show, audience mics at FOH and that pretty much fills up our capacity for the 64 channels.
“Everything about the DiGiGrid MBG just works. It makes recording a very simple process and that is a very good thing.”