Innovason Out in Force at 2012 Les Vieilles Charrues Music Festival

	Les Vieielles Charrues music festival

Les Vieilles Charrues celebrated its 21st birthday in July this year. Founded in 1992 in Brittany with the aim of making the widest possible range of music genres accessible to everybody, Les Vieilles Charrues, often cited as a French Glastonbury, has rapidly become the biggest music festival in France. The 2011 edition saw over 270,000 revelers during the four-day duration, and 2012 was set to break all records with headline acts including Bob Dylan, Sting, The Cure, Portishead, LMFAO, Kasabian, as well as many huge French artists such as Thomas Dutronc, Zebda, Orelsan, Amadou et Mariam, and many others. Console brand Innovason also had a strong presence at the festival in conjunction with Sombrero & Co. who is a specialist in live audio and video recording of major artists and events. Sombrero & Co. was in action at Les Vieilles Charrues with no less than three consoles (one for each of the main stages) deployed to handle live audio recording, mix, and streaming for both live TV and future documentaries and DVDs.

Each Eclipse was connected to a DioCore stagebox plus, in the case of the main stage and specifically for the performances of Sting and The Cure who required some 80 inputs each, a further Muxipaire stagebox which added another 24 microphone inputs to the 64 already provided by the DioCore. The onboard M.A.R.S. recorder of each Eclipse handled the recording of up to 64 pre-amps from each stage, with post-fader input recording handled by three MT-128s from VB Audio -- interestingly, the same recorder that is inside the Eclipse -- in order to keep an exact copy of the live mix destined for the TV channels. The signal from the stage to the console was transmitted via OptoCore over fiber optic.

Each stage was equipped with up to eight Solution D digital microphones from Neumann acting as ambient microphones, all directly controlled by the Eclipse consoles. The reason for this is that in the case that Sombrero & Co. don't have the recording rights for a particular group or artist therefore enabling them to take clean feeds off artists and musician microphones, the video trucks are supplied by a mix of feeds taken from the ambient microphones and the front-of-house consoles. It is therefore very important to have the highest possible sound quality from the ambient mics, making digital mics an excellent choice.

According to Sombrero & Co.'s Benoit Gilg who both engineered and headed up the sound recording team, the Eclipses performed impeccably. "For me, the Eclipse is simply the most intuitive console available on the market today," he stated. "For a start, you can configure it exactly as you want it, but even so, it works in exactly the same way as I think! For me, it's completely instinctive, which I love."

"The second big plus point is the quality of the preamps which are incredibly transparent and natural-sounding," he continued. "Personally I prefer to work with the purest sound possible from the source. I don't like it when equipment adds color or tone that I then have to work hard to remove! I'd rather know that anything that has been added -- or taken away -- has come from me, and not the equipment I'm using. In this respect, I love the purity of the Innovason preamps. They give me the cleanest, highest possible quality sound with which to work from the outset."

"Finally, and in my eyes, equally as important as any technical criteria, I can't speak highly enough of the Innovason team, and in particular, product manager and father of Eclipse, Hervé de Caro. Products are born of people, and so the relationships that you have with those people are important. Hervé is someone that is totally committed to his ideas, and utterly dedicated when it comes to support for his products -- we know that we can rely on him completely to find the best possible solution for any given scenario."