Left: FOH Engineer Jordi Brugues at the Roland M-5000. Right: Roland M-5000C stageside for monitors.

Barcelona, Spain, October 28th, 2015 – Chosen for festivals throughout Europe over the summer, the Roland M-5000 and M-5000C Live Digital Console combination once again proved to be a hit with the engineers at the recent Barcelona Acció Musical (BAM) Festival. Taking care of FOH and monitors for the La Mercé headline stage at BAM, the M-5000 and M-5000C together with Roland Digital Snakes provided a flexible and intuitive solution with their O.H.R.C.A architecture rapidly adapting to all the changing requirements and offering appropriate workflows for each situation.

The BAM Festival, now in its twentieth year, comprises of more than 40 bands playing different venues across Barcelona over 5 days and coincides with La Mercé, the city’s patron saint festival. BAM is renowned for bringing together technology and tradition, music and the performing arts and 2015 saw Marc Campillo, the founder and director of the independent label Foehn Records take the helm to deliver what was a truly innovative event.

For the Saturday night performances on the La Mercé stage, the M-5000 mixed down 72 channels delivered from the I/O boxes on the stage before splitting the signals down to the compact M-5000C at monitor position. Inputs from the bands playing were provided by the Roland S-4000S-3208 Digital Snake (32x8 Modular Stage Unit). The M-5000 used REAC (Roland Ethernet Audio Communication) to connect via Cat 5e cable at 96kHz to the S-4000S-3208. The M-5000 has two REAC ports allowing extra I/O boxes to be added and a third REAC port which can be used for connection to monitors, recording to a PC or standalone recorder such as the R-1000 or to the Roland M-48 personal monitoring system. The AES/EBU outputs for the PA system and processors were provided by the Roland S-2416 Digital Snake (24x16 Stage Unit).

FOH Engineer Jordi Brugues at the Roland M-5000 at the Barcelona Acció Musical (BAM) Festival.

Commenting on the setup, Roland ProAV Product Manager Nico Suarez, ‘There were a couple of features of the M-5000 that really stood out on this job. Since everything outdoors in Barcelona has to have a limiter inserted, the ability to use any input or output on the system to make an insert point was great. On top of that, having two insert points, one before EQ&DYN and the other after EQ&DYN, on each channel/buss; allowed me to use the on board limiter for the master before the real one was inserted and have control over the attacks and releases. Also as the PA system was very complicated we needed to have a Lake processor at the FOH position so the ability to make tie lines between any input and any output of the system allowed us to use the existing infrastructure to run back the outputs of the Lake’.

The M-5000 and M-5000C are based on a proprietary Roland platform known as O.H.R.C.A, which stands for three key concepts: Open; High Resolution; and Configurable Architecture. This internal architecture is not fixed to any configuration and can be freely defined within a range of up to 128 input or output channels or busses, allowing the operator essentially to ‘build’ a console to suit the application. Each path can be used as a mixing channel, AUX, matrix, subgroup buss or MIX-MINUS buss in any input/output configuration. All paths are delivered at a pristine 24-bit/96kHz sound quality. This open audio architecture supports Dante, MADI, Waves Sound Grid, and REAC audio protocols, as well as audio delivery over video using SDI, DVI and SFP cabling.

Full product list:
1 x Roland M-5000 Live Digital Mixing Console
1 x Roland M-5000C Compact Live Digital Mixing Console
1 x Roland S-4000S-3208 32 x 8 Modular Stage Unit
1 x Roland S-2416 Digital Snake 24x16 Stage Unit