The house orchestra of Italy’s prime time TV program I migliori anni (“The Best Years”) is relying on Aviom’s Pro16® personal mixing system to help take viewers on a trip back in time. The program which pins popular pop culture icons from two different decades against one another, is a live broadcast variety show which results in a winner and their respective “best decade.”
Broadcast weekly on Rai Uno and hosted by Carlo Conti, each episode of “The Best Years” highlights two different decades from the 60’s to present time, looking at the music, sex symbols and current events of those periods. The show features a variety of live dance performances, comedic skits, and musical performances with an orchestra conducted by Pinuccio Pirazzoli. After the performances, the in-house studio audience and the viewing audience at home are asked to vote for the winning decade. With the program being broadcast live, and involving music and dance performances from multiple musical genres, sound reinforcement engineer Fabio Spadoni has the challenge of providing the orchestra with a monitoring setup that ensures that everyone is on cue. The personalization that the Aviom personal mixing system brings to each musician helps Spadoni overcome that challenge week after week.
“With live television there are no do-overs, so every element of the show needs to be the best it can be – even the audio equipment,” explains Spadoni. “The Aviom personal mixers allow each instrument section to have a monitor mix that works best for them, allowing them to focus on their performance rather than the equipment.”
All mic inputs on the show’s set are sent to a Studer Vista 8 console that has two Studer-built Aviom A-Net® output cards installed. Two sets of 16-channel monitor mix content for the musicians are assigned to the console’s A-Net cards by the mix engineer. The cards’ A-Net outputs are then each connected to an A-16D Pro A-Net Distributor – one for the rhythm, string and vocal sections and the other for the brass section. From the A-16D Pro, Cat-5 feeds are sent to the A-16II Personal Mixers for the four musician groups identified by Spadoni: rhythmic band (drum, bass, two guitars, two keyboards, percussion), brass section ( two trumpets, two sax, trombone), backing vocals and strings (three violins, two violas, two cellos). The Pro16 mixing system simplifies the show’s setup each week and provides repeatable, high quality monitoring during both rehearsals and the live broadcast. At the same time it helps keep the musician’s monitoring levels low on the set, helping to improve the overall quality of the show’s broadcast audio by eliminating extraneous noise on the set from open-air monitor speakers.
