Stéphane Diskuss @ Brussels

Musician, Sound designer and engineer.

Musician, Sound & Light engineer for Magali Rousseau’s “Je brasse de l’air”.

“BigVCA reduced my setup time, gave me more freedom, 

and full access to all my output levels on stage.”

My on-stage booth has to be really compact. With BigVCA, I get full access to my sound levels in a single module. Before that I used to hide the mixing tables provided by the venues under the riser supporting the booth.

For the show “Je brasse de l’air”, I play live clarinet, cue sound and light from my booth, and appear on stage. I use four midi controllers, my clarinet microphone on a stand, a laptop and an RME Fireface 800 soundcard. I have four channels for the quadraphonic PA system and two for separate subwoofers. BigVCA considerably reduced my setup time, gave me more independence and full access to my output levels on stage.

The sound is crystal clear. I particularly appreciate the precise gain control knob. It enables me to turn down the volume of the venue’s amps when I need to lower the noise level dramatically or adjust the PA system to my soundtrack, anywhere from quietest to loudest.

BigVCA is just perfect for my booth! Analog is back at last!

Designer’s note :

I was working as a sound engineer at Toulouse National Theatre when Stéphane showed up with his show “Je Brasse de l’Air”. I saw straight away that my BigVCA suited his needs perfectly.

With an analog mixing table (as requested in his technical rider) in his quadraphonic setup, he had been having trouble with low level, but disturbing white noise coming from the speakers. Particularly for very silent moments of the show. After replacing the mixer with by my Big VCA, the unwanted noise disappeared completely.

Because my BigVCA is designed to interface directly with soundcard outputs, there are no preamps on the inputs, only pure line receivers. This is an important difference between BigVCA and any mixing table. With the mixing table removed, there is no preamp stage to introduce noise that isn’t on the soundtrack.

George Dyson