Big Brother Canada

For the seventh season of the reality television show Big Brother Canada, Solotech was in the mix supplying audio needs for the television production. Big Brother follows a group of strangers living together in a house that is outfitted with a number of cameras and microphones recording their every move, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Solotech supplied a Lawo MC2-36 all-in-one audio console to the show as well as a large wireless microphone deployment, satellite speakers and microphones for covering all the houseguests inside of the Big Brother house.

Big Brother Canada, which wrapped the season up in early May with the reveal of this year’s winner, aired three times a week on Global TV and a part of the show is a live studio audience. This season the production team was looking to upgrade the audio console used for mixing for the live studio audience and after consulting with Phil Hornung, Solotech Technical Advisor – Live Productions, they took his recommendation. The team selected the Allen & Heath dLive S5000 paired with the A&H DM64 MixRack and an A&H SuperMADI audio networking card. “Erickson Pro, a division of Jam Industries, who represent Allen & Heath in Canada, provided support that exceeded expectations during the evaluation process,” notes Hornung. “For the past few years, we had been using an older model audio console that had a larger footprint and less features available, so this was a good opportunity to move to the dLive S5000 on this show.”

The A&H dLive S5000 is a medium-sized control surface with the addition of built-in audio I/O and audio networking ports and has a very sophisticated MADI I/O option card. Hornung also knew that, “the dLive S5000 could interface with the complex broadcast audio console and matrix system in place for the show, regardless of sampling rate, channel count, or MADI format. In addition, the console has a 64-channel automatic microphone mixer,” explains Hornung. “We had been using two separate 16-channel AMMs linked together, externally to the console environment. This was a much better solution for this production.” The S5000 is paired with the A&H DM64 MixRack, which is the heart of any dLive system. It houses the XCVI processing core complete with audio I/O, control and audio networking ports.

John Lacina, a senior audio engineer with Solotech, was in the studio bringing his expertise to the production as the mix engineer for the live studio audience. Rob Kennedy is the Solotech account executive for Big Brother Canada.