Two recent editions of the Czech & Slovakia Got Talent show, the local edition of the FeemantleMedia hit, were shot at the restored Castle Lednice (the Summer palace of the Liechtenstein Royal Family until they fled in 1943), near Brno, which presented some technical challenges for the production team.
In particular, the audio recording was an area Jam Film 1999, which produces the show for TV Prima in the Czech Republic and TV JOJ in Slovakia, wanted to look at. It had caused problems on previous theatre audition shows and the director, Jeffo Minařík, demanded a better solution.
Boris Seitler from G-Tec Professional, Merging Technologies’ Slovakian distributors was confident that the Horus Networked Audio Interface and Pyramix 8.0 would provide a neater and more efficient solution that would provide considerable flexibility and reliability.
The front of house sound was supplied by Amex Audio and the main recording mixer was a Soundcraft Vi6. This was linked to the Horus via MADI with a feed from the MADI input routed directly to the 24 AES/EBU outputs going to a JoeCo BlackBox recorder for back up.
The Horus was then connected to Pyramix (pictured) using the Ravenna IP Audio Network to record 50 channels of audio and deal with the D/A feeds from the Pyramix. This neat installation covered all requirements with no external boxes or complex cabling required.
There was also a feed from the Horus D/A providing audio for the directors in the Reckord HD OB van and for the Phonak in-ear system for the judges and presenters. For added security, the presenters microphones were recorded on a Sound Devices 788-T and sent back to Horus. The back-ups were good insurance but were never needed as Horus and Pyramix performed faultlessly.
“We didn’t know very much about Horus, but Boris assured us that this would be a much better solution than what we used before,” said the freelance sound engineer, Alex Molcanov, who worked on the show. “He was certainly correct and this was such an easy system to use and handled a lot of channels which was perfect for this type of event.”
Horus is a comprehensive audio router and format converter, offering transparent Analogue to Digital conversion, and is claimed to be “one of the most pristine microphone pre-amplifiers available anywhere”.
By David Fox
