Sound By Design recently supplied the sound reinforcement for The Brit Awards Launch 2007, held this year on the 16th January at Hammersmith Palais. The hour-long launch show showcased some of the UK’s top acts and was broadcast on ITV an hour later that evening, with performances from James Morrison, Lemar, The Feeling and The Fratellis.

Unusually for a television broadcast, where it is normal for the PA design brief to be as unobtrusive as possible, this year Sound By Design were asked to provide a ‘rock-and-roll’ style ground stack system that could provide a high-fidelity and high impact experience for the audience. To achieve this, systems engineer Dave Shepherd installed a system of eight Meyer Sound M2D curvilinear array loudspeakers, complimented with EM Acoustics’ ‘Quake’ subwoofers to give a system that really packed a punch! He lined this up with BSS Omnidrive Compact Plus' and MacFOH analysis software so the guest engineers could simply walk up and start mixing on a ruler flat system.

With a combined input list of around 48 channels, Sound By Design's DiGiCo D1 consoles were given another outing as we incorporated two 48 channel digital MADI stage racks into our setup with BSS active splits between front-of-house, monitors and the broadcast truck. DiGiCo D1’s are Sound By Design’s board of choice for multi-band television shows as they allow us to save and recall each band’s sound-check in an instant.

Out front, Senior Engineer Griff Hewis took charge of the D1, with external outboard processing and effects from XTA, Lexicon and TC Electronics. An additional Midas Venice was utilised during the stage changeovers to run the presenter mics and VT links, in order to free up the DiGiCo during line-checks between each band. Each D1 session file was structured so that the band engineer only had to deal with the specific channels of their band in any order that they preferred, keeping things very simple and easy to check.

A second D1 was used for monitors, with Senior Engineer John Gale overseeing this world. He chose Sound By Design's EM Acoustics M-12s wedges powered by QSC amplifiers, with double drum-fill stacks of Meyer Sound USW -1P subs and M-12 wedges. Meyer Sound CQ-1s were also provided as side-fill along with five sets of Shure PSM700 with E5 drivers for wireless in-ear monitoring. Two external Yamaha SPX990s provided additional reverb where required for the IEMs in addition to the mixing console’s onboard effects engines.