I finished up my DLP road test with a marathon weekend of shows, the most interesting being a charity dinner at Chelsea Piers in New York City. The World Health Year Chapin Awards Dinner is $10,000 a table and this year included performances by Jackson Browne, Tom Chapin, and Bruce Springsteen. Very high class corporate gig, thanks to Jason Dermer for bringing me in on it.
I had two DLP processors, one configured 4x12 for mains and fill processing, and the other configured 8x8 for monitors. I inserted the 8x8 into the first 8 aux buses of my Spectra T at monitor world, and ran the 4x12 from Jason's Spectra T at FOH out to two hangs of line array, 2 subwoofers stacked stage right, and four fill/delay speakers to cover the L shaped room and patio. As I said in my last post in this thread, the two DLP integrated seamlessly, and getting them up and running with my access point and the tablet PC provided was easy, although I know more about networking than most.
To get the system making acceptable noise I put together some quick routing and level adjustments as a rough guesstimate, fed some playback into the DLP, and used the tablet to turn down the inputs all the way. I set up a few basic groups, the line arrays, the delays, all mains, and all monitors. This let me walk around the room and patio and adjust the level of my playback up and down while listening to set delays, levels, and EQ for all the speakers in the system. Once I was satisfied with the results (and had been told how cool my little toy was by the entire tech staff, one at a time) I walked on stage, routed some playback to my wedges, checked all those lines, and then inserted a few small cuts on those mixes based on prior experience with SM87s. The final result was nearly seamless coverage between the various sections of mains coverage and extremely clean monitor mixes, all put together in two shakes of a rat's tail. The DLPs let me get better results, faster, with less fooling around with patching and routing than if I hadn't had so many inputs and outputs on one device, or some tiny little screen instead of the great tablet interface.
Some photos of my setup:
My FOH EQ rack with the welcome additions from Dolby:
And a few shots of the room and delays:
Long story short, the Dolby Lake Processor has changed the way I tune systems. Like many, prior to using it, I believed the tablet interface was overrated, and the units themselves probably not worth the expense over a decent "moderate budget" DSP. Now I don't believe I can afford
not to own one, at least for mains. The ability to
listen to a system while I put it together is a real killer app, the flexibility and power of the tablet interface and the freedom to walk around to each of my coverage zones and check for any hidden nasties in real time is invaluable. I am very sorry to have to send these two units back, and will miss them at every show until I can afford to get back into this kind of performance.
For users who demand the utmost in quality for making the most of their sound systems, this is the best option I have ever seen. From the front panel to the tablet, everything is right at your fingertips, from comprehensive metering and limiting, to EQ, polarity, and level control. Heck, you can even lift input and output grounds remotely to help fix hum and buzz problems!
Do yourself a favor, forget the expense, and take a very long look at the Dolby Lake Processor. For me, it was like stepping up from groups to VCAs in terms of control and flexibility. They'll be at InfoCOMM next week.