SiriusXM Satellite Radio Upgrades JALC With Avid Solutions

Avid® has confirmed that SiriusXM Satellite Radio has upgraded its Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC) mixing and recording studios with Avid audio hardware and software solutions for its popular live music broadcasts on radio and online streaming.

The satellite radio broadcasting company has upgraded its workflow with Pro Tools® | HDX systems, Avid S6 control surfaces, and Pro Tools | MTRX audio interfaces. The upgrade gives Rob Macomber, SiriusXM’s Grammy and Emmy® award-winning chief engineer of the studios at JALC, the sound quality, reliability and flexibility he needs to mix, record and produce the JALC broadcasts enjoyed by millions of jazz fans.

JALC is a part of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, along with the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera. JALC records and produces live broadcasts from its three main venues — the 1,233-seat Rose Theater, The Appel Room with its backdrops of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline, and the intimate Dizzy's Club. With more than 3,000 live-to-internet broadcasts produced to date, Macomber was one of the first engineers to mix live broadcasts “in the box” using Pro Tools and Avid control surfaces. The success and reliability of his Avid workflow gave SiriusXM the confidence to keep things within the Avid family when it decided to upgrade its two studios with redundant Pro Tools | HDX systems and dual Avid S6 control surfaces.

Comparing Avid S6 to the previous generations of Avid solutions, Rob Macomber said: "When working on live shows, it’s important to have as much information in front of me as possible, and right off the bat, the S6 offered 20 times more information on its displays than I could ever see on the ICON."

SiriusXM also added Pro Tools | MTRX audio interfaces to handle monitoring in the studios as well as front-end preamplification and A/D conversion for Dizzy’s Club. Macomber can remotely control the preamps and routing of MTRX in the club directly from his Avid S6 surfaces.

Macomber explained: "We have just installed a 40-channel Avid MTRX box in Dizzy’s. We really go for a non-colored, pristine, clean sound here. The converters and the preamps on the MTRX are stunning on the front end, and on the back end, converting back to analog for monitoring is much wider and deeper."

Macomber's unique 'in-the-box' workflow not only delivers fail-safe live-to-broadcast reliability via redundant Pro Tools systems, it also enables him to easily remix live recordings for subsequent release using the same setup—something that has proved very useful to Macomber for JALC’s current campaign of releasing 100 records over the next five years on its Blue Engine Records label.

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