Europe's Biggest Open-Air Festival Gets DiGiCo Treatment

	Picture courtesy of Othmar Eichinger

The Donauinselfest -- or Danube Island Festival -- is a huge, free annual event that attracts millions of visitors to Vienna each June. This year, rental company Concept Solutions provided two DiGiCo SD8s for the festival's front-of-house and monitor duties, supplied to them by DiGiCo's Austrian distributor, TON Eichinger.

Concept Solution's Raphael Rupprecht explains what was involved at this truly massive event. "This is a three-day festival featuring open-air stages around the island," he says. "We started working at 9am every day, bands arrived at 10am for soundcheck and the show itself ran from 3pm to 12pm. It was a huge workload -- we had to set up our standard backline, plus the individual amps and instruments for each band and sometimes there were as many as four drum kits on stage waiting to be miked up -- but all acts ran smoothly and the overall mood was great.

"The starting point for each act was a standard console setup, which was adapted as needed. I had prepared eight effects: drum plate, percussion room, medium plate, guitar chorus, vocal plate, warm hall, simple delay, kick ambience, which was plenty for most requirements.

"The SD8's onboard matrix allows for 12 busses in addition to the 24 stereo busses, which is very special. We used this to feed main PA, subs, outfill, frontfill, delays and VIP area. The full processing, plus dynamic EQs and multiband dynamics, even on the matrix busses, resulted in a powerful and perfectly balanced sound in every area, which was very nice."

The majority of the bands had their own front-of-house engineer with them, with Raphael mixing those that didn't. Concept Solutions also provided a monitor engineer, as only a few bands had taken their own.

"The SD8 has 24 stereo auxes for in-ear monitoring, all with full processing, plus a stereo master for side fills, so this was plenty for everything we needed," adds Raphael. "The gain tracking feature of the SD8s was used to share the same racks between FOH and monitors, which was a great relief as in previous years we had to use huge analog splitters. This time we had less equipment, straight and clean wiring, plus better reliability -- who wouldn't like that? It's so quick to use these desks that changeovers were completed in half the time scheduled."

Acceptance from the engineers for the Festival's new mixing solution was above Concept Solutions' expectations.

"It was 100%," smiles Raphael. "If anybody was not used to DiGiCo, I took a few minutes to show them how to operate the desk. Everybody was familiar with the SD8 very quickly, even those who never had worked on a digital desk before.

"This was a perfect setup. We had a great result, happy musicians and an excited audience - see you next year."