Prom Praise Features Neumann Digital

Saturday 21st April saw London’s historic Royal Albert Hall hosting Neumann digital mics for the first time.
The event, Prom Praise featuring the All Souls Orchestra, was celebrating its 40th anniversary and Surrey based Sound By Design (SBD) was also celebrating 20 years of looking after the event’s sound requirements, so it was fitting that the event’s audio should be captured by something special.
"It really started after Phil Wright and I attended one of Sennheiser UK’s Digi-Mic Day’s, held in conjunction with digital console manufacturer DiGiCo throughout March this year," explained SBD’s Griff Hewis. "Sennheiser’s Sound Reinforcement Specialist, Dave Wooster, took us through the Neumann / Sennheiser range and demonstrated the advantages that digital mics could offer us and also showed us how easily we could integrate the mics into our existing inventory of DiGiCo consoles by simply adding AES42 input cards to our racks. That got us thinking and we decided that the time had come to put this new technology onto a big show. Between them, Sennheiser UK’s Dave Wooster, Nick Pemberton and Alan March pulled the relevant kit together and we were ready to go!"
SBD decided to deploy an All Digital Decca Tree (ADDT), consisting of three KK 133 diffuse field omni mic capsules fitted to KM D output stages, suspended above the conductor’s position, along with a further two ‘digital outriggers’, also using KK 133 capsules, dropped from the same suspension cable. Two additional digital mics, using standard KK 183 omni capsules, were suspended further back for audience and ambience capture. In this application, the improvements offered by digital mics over their analogue counterparts were immediately noticeable.
"With analogue, it’s often the case that you struggle with noise and unwanted artefacts over long cable runs," states Griff. "The difference using the Neumann digital mics was remarkable. The signals coming back were incredibly quiet and clean, while the improvement in the bottom end response was phenomenal."
Would SBD be tempted to run with digital mics on future projects and events?
Griff’s one word answer speaks volumes – "Definitely!"
www.sennheiser.co.uk
(GK)