Sound By Design recently supplied the sound reinforcement for The Brit Awards Launch 2006 held this year on the 10th January at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith. The hour-long launch party was broadcast on ITV later that evening, with performances from The Kaiser Chiefs, The Magic Numbers, and KT Tunstall.

As is typical with television broadcast, our design brief was to be as unobtrusive as possible in providing high-fidelity sound reinforcement and monitoring across two stages for an audience of around 400 people. The two adjacent stages provided a front-of-house system challenge as we flew our PA around the permanently installed house system left in for ITV's CD:UK. To achieve this our system engineer Dave Shepherd provided an excellent three-hang design incorporating 18 Meyer Sound M1D curvilinear array loudspeakers complimented with Meyer Sound PSW-4 subs, all managed by three BSS Omnidrive Compact Plus systems and two Meyer Sound LD-3 line drivers.

With a combined input list of around 70 channels, Sound By Design's new Digico D1 Live consoles were given a real test as we incorporated two 48 channel digital MADI stage racks into our setup, one for each stage. Analogue BSS active splits provided a feed to the broadcast gallery whilst the monitor and front-of-house desks took their signal feeds from the MADI racks.

Front-of-house engineer Griff Hewis chose the Digico D1 for its versatility and small frame size. "The real joy with digital boards on a show like this is that you can tailor the board to guest engineers requirements and recall their exact mix come show time. In the old day's this would have required a pen and paper and with TV there just isn't enough time to dial settings in. The Kaiser Chiefs' engineer was able to e-mail over his mix settings a week before the show and we were able to give him his exact EQ and reverb settings before the band had even sound checked". In addition, Griff utilised a Midas Venice for the speech and VT links whilst the D1 was being prepared for the next band.

Monitor engineer John Gale chose Sound By Design's EM Acoustics M-12S wedges powered by QSC amplifiers due to their compact yet powerful nature. A Meyer Sound USW -1P sub and USM -1P drum fill stack was utilised and a Meyer Sound CQ-1 was provided as side fill where required. Again choosing the Digico D1 Live was a natural choice for John; "For a show like this digital boards are the simplest option. I can easily accommodate all the channels that are required and recall each sound check instantly. By telling the board which stage box to look at, moving stages is simply a case of changing snapshots - there is no need for frantic re-patching and no need for a console to mix each stage, which saves a lot of space and hassle. As for wedges, the M12S's are fantastic. They can be run with the EQ pretty much flat and sound great, I love working with them". In addition to stage monitoring John also ran five sets of wireless in-ear monitors for KT Tunstall using Sennheiser E300's with Shure E5 drivers and a hard-wired in-ear mix for The Kaiser Chiefs drummer.