Eggs & Bulbs Adds Soundcraft Si Compact For Hyde Park UEFA Champions League Build Up

German sound engineer Martin Stoll has purchased a Soundcraft Si Compact 24 digital console to add to the growing inventory of his production company, Bavarian-based Eggs & Bulbs GmbH.
Already a Vi6 user, the experienced sound man has been involved with the Schule fur Rundfunktechnik (School for Radio Technology), which was set up in Nuremburg, since as far back as 1985. Seven years later he formed Martin Stoll Audio Production, which was renamed Eggs & Bulbs in 1997 and is today based in nearby Fürth.
Having familiarised himself with digital mixing at an early stage he was seeking a platform "with everything on board - at a good price" specifically to run the UEFA Champions Festival 2011 at Speaker's Corner in London's Hyde Park - a week-long celebration of football leading up to the UEFA Champions League final at Wembley.
Needing a small-footprint surface with contemporary features his search led him through all the obvious candidates. But with a Soundcraft Vi1 already in Eggs & Bulbs' inventory he chose an Si Compact 24 to handle the second performance stage in Hyde Park, while the company's Soundcraft Vi1 was on duty at the main central stage. The sale was handled by Thomann Audio Professional.
The Si packs powerful digital mixing facilities along with Lexicon effects into a compact form factor. Features include 24 recallable mic pre amps plus four stereo returns with each input fully equipped with compressors, gates, parametric EG, High Pass Filter and delay. Buses and output processing match the versatility of the inputs - all mix and matrix buses feature a compressor and parametric EQ and to complement the channel processing Si Compact offers four stereo Lexicon FX processors to provide a wealth of user adjustable parameters.
After its first outing, Martin Stoll said he was very impressed with the desk. He concluded: "The Si Compact 24 has the same sound characteristics as the Vi Series and we can use optical MADI with the Vi Stageboxes extremely economically - giving us a better performance at a highly competitive price."
(KMcA)