Solid State Logic System T at the Heart of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo™, Featuring 22 Performers over 20 Consecutive Nights

System T S500: Bountiful networking options

Malcolm Harper, owner and operator of Reelsound Recording, a Texas-based mobile audio recording service, was at the event for his 28th time this year to mix shows for each performer. “Solid State Logic’s System T S500 gave me every option to interface audio from each band with analog mic inputs, MADI Bridge and the SRC Dante units. The on-board effects and processing covered all my needs with the excellent sound SSL is known for,” Harper says.

Each year, Harper captures the concert performances to a multitrack recording system for the Rodeo's archive. He additionally generates a stereo mix that is fed to the broadcast control room near NRG Stadium. From there, it is also distributed across the park to locations such as the NRG Center, NRG Arena, livestock area, shopping and dining areas and other public spaces.

The ultimate in flexibility

“Part of the challenge is being ready for anything,” says George Horton, SSL’s Vice President, Western Region. “We don’t know what brand of console artists are going to come with, or what sample rate or flavor of split they’re going to provide.” To accommodate any eventuality, he says, SSL supplied several units from the company’s Network I/O line of products, which were housed in a rack at the side of the stage next to the monitor mix position and fed the System T over a single mode fiber link.

Two Net I/O MADI Bridge devices, with built-in sample rate conversion, were available to each accept 64 channels of 48 kHz audio, supporting a total of 128 inputs. Each MADI Bridge could alternatively take in two 32-channel streams at 96 kHz and combine them into a single 64-channel 48 kHz Dante stream, between them handling 128 channels of 96 kHz MADI if required, Horton says.

“We also provided an HC Bridge SRC, an optically-isolated Dante bridge. If someone came in with a Dante split, we could take up to 256 Dante channels at 48k or 96k,” he says.