The Hollywood Bowl purchased a pair of DiGiCo SD7 digital mixing consoles for its 2014 summer series of concerts, which came to an end in late September. The new consoles enable production staff to upgrade the installed PA system to 96kHz resolution. The two SD7s are on a single Optocore loop, with all of the DiGiCo DSP located on stage.
The 18,000-seat Hollywood Bowl was named Pollstar’s best major outdoor concert venue for a 10th consecutive year in early 2014. Paul Geller, production director at the Hollywood Bowl, said the PA system sounded great at 48kHz. “But when you hear it at 96k, there are certain subtle differences that you pick up, such as the dynamic range of the highs and lows. It also produces a very natural acoustic sound. It’s a great marriage between the DiGiCo console and the L-Acoustics loudspeaker system.”
Fred Vogler, principal sound designer and mixer for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who anchored the summer concert series, commented: “We’re at 96k with 160-something inputs and it still sounds as pristine as with two channels. I think that a big part of the resolution we’re getting is the front end of that console. It’s got a lot of high-quality mic pres, signal paths and processing. It’s wonderful to have that kind of front end and feed it out of an L-Acoustics speaker system on the back end.”
