JoeCo BlackBox records Sting at Henley

13 August 2012

UK - A BlackBox BBR64-MADI Recorder was used by award-winning engineer Donal Hodgson to capture Sting's recent Henley Festival show.

Hodgson, who has recorded and mixed Sting for over a decade said, "I have been using Pro Tools in the studio, live on and off stage, but just recently broke free of my comfort zone and decided to try JoeCo's BBR64-MADI Recorder. Sting has been using a Studer Vista 5 for FOH so I was very confident that the A to D would be good and utilising the BlackBox meant I wouldn't need to hire a van to carry my usual rig to the show, or upset production by taking up valuable seating space with a couple of big racks.

"Actually I was surprised how small my recording rig turned out to be. All I needed was a 2U rack - 1U for the BBR and 1U for the Glyph GT062E HD. The BBR64-MADI is surprisingly small considering it records 64 tracks. And, as it has an external PSU it really doesn't weigh very much. I liked the fact that the PSU has a small locking device and can't accidentally be knocked or pulled out.

"Connecting the device is simple; we used a fibre connection to the Studer console and a standard USB cable to connect the BBR to the hard drive. My drive was Mac OS formatted, so I used the BBR64-MADI to reformat the drive to FAT32 in a matter of minutes. It was pretty easy to find and then set the clock ref to the MADI input and I was ready to record."

Released during 2011, the BBR64-MADI Recorder records/replays up to 64 channels of MADI data at standard sample rates, without requiring a computer. Double sample rate recording (up to 96kHz) is also accommodated. The recorder additionally caters for 56-channel legacy MADI and can capture a further 8 channels of analogue (balanced line in).

(Jim Evans)