The Backstreet Boys recently became the first pop act to perform at the Sphere in Las Vegas, where their summer-long residency at the fully immersive venue celebrates the 25th anniversary of the release of the band’s Millennium album.
To interface with the Sphere’s 360-degree sound system, front-of-house mixer James McCullagh and playback engineer Tim Rose have integrated a total of five Thunder | Core-driven Digital Audio Denmark (DAD) Core 256 interfaces into their setups to handle playback and recording and to host plug-ins.
James McCullagh has been holding down the FOH mix position with the Backstreet Boys since early 2013.
This is a complicated setup and a complicated show at one of the most sophisticated venues in the world. I’m using two Core 256s primarily to run plug-ins and to record. I needed a really small box with high quality, high channel-count audio that could handle multiple different formats with the lowest possible latency.
The playback setup is hosted on several maxed-out Apple Mac mini M4 Pro computers.
Elaborating on his system at the SSL Live mixing console he’s using at FOH, McCullagh explains:
I’m using one of my DAD Core 256s to multitrack the show. That’s 160 channels and comes in over Dante and then goes to Reaper for recording. I wanted to use a lot of reverbs and I’ve got 16 CPU-intensive Bricasti emulations running. Those are on the second Core 256; that basically does all the heavy lifting. I’m running those on a Mac mini M4 Pro with Gig Performer software, and it works very well.
Gig Performer can be seen on the right in this Backstreet Boys show in Vegas.
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