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Sennheiser/ DiGiCo press release:

Love it or hate it, Britain's Got Talent is a television phenomenon, and it is back on our screens this April. Produced by TalkbackThames, one of the UK's largest production companies, with a raft of award winning programmes such as The Apprentice, The Bill, Grand Designs, Property Ladder and Never Mind The Buzzcocks to its name, the show is now in its fifth year and is surely one of the company’s biggest successes.

Sennheiser UK has played a vital part in the production, supplying both microphones and a K-Array loudspeaker system to address the needs of the show’s auditions element.

Broadcast equipment supply company HotCam UK is in charge of audio/visual requirements, with Delta Media, the broadcast arm of Delta Sound, supplying them with audio equipment. Delta’s Fred Jackson and sound supervisor for the show, Sean Taylor, are always looking for innovative solutions for both BGT and TalkbackThames’s other run-away success, The X Factor. “Each year we find ways of fine-tuning things and making it more cost effective,” says Jackson.

Auditions for BGT run in five cities around the UK, with multiple dates in theatres in each location, the team effectively taking each theatre’s A/V structure apart to turn it into a television studio.

“The format of BGT is that members of the public have just walked in off the street, come on to the stage and we’re letting them make a noise with whatever they usually make a noise with,” explains Taylor. “The equipment we use has to be flexible, so we use a combination that includes Sennheiser radio microphones, K-Array loudspeakers and DiGiCo SD8 mixing consoles.”

Sennheiser UK first alerted Jackson and Taylor to the available K-Array solutions in 2009. They quickly saw the benefits and first used selected products during the 2010 series. “We’d been talking to Sennheiser since 2008,” says Jackson. “We took a trip out to K-Array’s Italian HQ in 2009 to hear the system there. At that point, although we were still taking a bit of an educated guess because it’s a really unconventional product, we decided we had to try it out. It worked extremely well, surpassing what we thought it was going to do.

“The Sennheiser team, including Paul Nunnington (product manager for K-Array), Dave Wooster (sound reinforcement specialist) and Alan March (business development specialist), have been excellent at support and supply, with Paul and Dave both spending a considerable amount of time on site to ensure we had everything we needed and that it was all running smoothly.”

The flown PA for the current series (the first show aired on 16th April) comprised dual hangs of four K-Array KH4 high performance self-powered, two-way line array cabinets and four KS4 high performance dipole subwoofer cabinets per side. Compact portable powered KR200s were positioned in the balcony for additional judges’ feeds, as well as KT22 miniature sound source passive loudspeakers downstairs and at the rear of the stalls. Stage side-fill is fulfilled via three KH15 two-way line arrays and two KO40 subs per side.

Additionally, a total of 20 channels of Sennheiser EM1046 receivers were used in conjunction with SKM5200 handheld microphones and SK5212 bodypacks.

“The flown KH system provided complete and even coverage for the entire balcony in each theatre,” says Fred. “And the KH15s on stage fixed every issue we have ever had.”

“The side fills are working very well,” adds Guy Davis, systems engineer. “The flown PA level is brilliant – we need to make sure that we can get the mics above the noise of the crowd, which normally sits at around 95dB - and the presence from the box for the vocal is very good. It really is impressive what you can get out of such a thin box.

“This is the first time we’ve used the KH4s. The ability to get more level within the room, the gain before feedback off the judges’ mics and the weight loading make it ideal. On this tour we don’t have the ability to have a huge amount of PA, so that’s very important. The fact that they are self-powered means we can keep the amount of kit at the side of the stage down and, as that is where presenters Ant and Dec do all their bits to camera from, that is a big advantage. There is also quite a lot of low end off the flat panels, which we weren’t expecting, and that’s a bonus.”

Taylor chose an SD8 for mixing the auditions live. “It made simple sense to me, as someone who hadn’t used a digital desk regularly before,” he recalls. “I could just walk up to it, press a few buttons and off it went, which was very reassuring.”

Jackson mixed the first few series of BGT before moving on to a supervisory role and recalls the first run of auditions before handing over to the current crew of engineers...

“A key requirement of the console is being able to change a wide variety of settings extremely quickly, because the crew never knows exactly what’s going to happen,” he says. “That’s what makes it so crazy. There are no rehearsals to these auditions, just a few guidelines. It’s so intense and mixed completely on the fly that I had to go for instant control. The assignable rotaries make the SD8 fit the bill incredibly well.”

As well as needing to be able to change the parameters of up to 28 channels very quickly, the biggest challenge for the SD8 is that the sound sources are so varied. There is a rack of playback equipment at the side of the stage with a member of staff ready to hit ‘play’. Contestants bring a wide variety of material, from professionally-produced CD backing tracks to noisy, poor-quality material on cassette tape.

“This is where the SD8 really comes into its own,” he continues. “If you're suddenly receiving a massive level from something, the mic/line amps are so forgiving that it doesn’t madly distort. It can handle very high transients that you can deal with, rather than just emitting a horrible distorted noise.”