After more than thirty years on the road with Neil Diamond, sound engineer Stanley Miller is now approaching one of his long targeted goals, “Putting as much of the signal path as possible into the digital domain is - for live sound - one of the best ways of ensuring signal integrity. Besides which, in the digital domain there’s no buzz, no hums.” He said this back in the early nineties, at the time he was experimenting with multiple Yamaha ProMix 01s and 02Rs for front of house control - he’s come a long way since then and life in some ways has become easier.
“For this current tour we have a pair of PM5Ds for mixing the show, one out front, one for monitors.” He said. “The recall of the console - which I’ve been preaching about for a long time - is amazing.” Miller has used the bigger Yamaha PM1D on previous tours, so his experience of this function is long, but there are elements to the newer PM5D he also finds extremely attractive. “The EQ is exactly what it needs to be”, he said. “The sends, muting, effects on/off is all taken care of in the programming - so I can concentrate on the show and mix.”
Miller has a big band on stage to contend with, two guitars and bass, full drums and a percussionist, a pair of keyboard players, four piece brass, and three backing vocalists. “Even so we’ve managed to squeeze the inputs down to 48 to fit the desk.” Miller uses a set of DME64s, the Yamaha digital mix engine, to marshal all the inputs to himself and Bernie Becker on monitors. “There’s five DMEs on the stage, one front of house, and a pair by the PA amps; essentially they’re a giant patch bay, a matrix and routing device for our purposes. For the analogue signal from the mics we run them straight into eight channel AD8HR units. The AD8HR’s allow two things to happen, one is a digital split to the monitor and FOH consoles, plus a really superior sound over the pre-amps built in the standard consoles. With this system of signal path, we do not need the extra expense of the RH model of the desk and we are doing the split completely in the digital domain So apart from the mic leads, all signal runs in digital, not converting back to analogue again until it emerges from the amplifier on it’s way to the speakers.”
There are of course other desks, “and yes I have tried them,” he said. “But Yamaha has been proven in the field - I’ve been using this product line since the old PM1000s - reliability is the key, I knew this was going to work.”
Miller uses MSI Inc to provide his PA system, a JBL Vertech line array with Lake Mesa for EQ, the amps are Crown Itech thus maintaining that digital control to an even greater degree of finesse. “This is as good as it gets,” he concluded, though you get the impression he’s just waiting for digital mics - not so far fetched - and digital speakers, “that might be a while coming.”
