During my career in professional audio, I have spent many a challenging and enjoyable day, recording live concerts and recording sessions using various trucks and carry-in rigs, and my fantasy Christmas present is the Spiritland One recording truck, which I consider to be at the current pinnacle of both tech and working environment.

From 1981 to 1990 I worked for Piccadilly Radio, which is the commercial radio station covering the Greater Manchester area. I started out as a maintenance engineer providing engineering support, and keeping the radio station on the air 24/7. In 1985 I became responsible for all outside broadcasts for the station, and as a part of that, we built our own outside broadcast truck. We installed one of the last Amek M1000 desks to be made and for a multitrack recorder, we bought a secondhand Studer A80 2-inch 16-track machine, which turned out to have been Apple Studios’ first 16-track recorder.

The truck was nicknamed the Multi-truck, and it was used for a wide range of different jobs, from recording bands at the Manchester Apollo and GMEX to being a mobile studio for party political conference coverage as well as classical recordings at the Manchester Free Trade Hall.

I continued to use it occasionally after I left Piccadilly Radio in 1990 and went freelance. But I really wanted a truck of my own.

In 1991, I learnt that an ex BBC B type truck was up for sale and together with Mike Spratt and Charlie Jones, we formed The Omnibuss Mobile Ltd, bought the truck and refurbished it.

With it, we did a lot of work for Granada TV (now part of ITV) with 3 series of New Sessions, recordings bands live at smaller venues, and mixing them live straight to stereo. Then, in February 1993, I mixed the first live Dolby Surround broadcast in the UK. The head of sport at Granada wanted to broadcast all their football matches in Dolby Pro Logic Surround and so we arranged the necessary units from Dolby and augmented the monitoring so we could mix in Pro Logic Surround. Other highlight included recording the Saw Doctors live in Manchester and then driving the truck across to their home town on the west coast of Ireland to record them in their local pub, and then to mix the concert and pub sessions in the truck so that they could oversee the mix without having to travel.

Then there was the time we were booked to record U2 live at the GMEX Arena in Manchester. However, when we got the channel list, it exceeded 100 inputs. The Omnibuss Mobile could handle 40, so to cover the extra channels, I hired the Piccadilly Radio Multi-truck, added an additional desk and strapped the two trucks together to be able to handle all the inputs.

Trucks are inherently compact spaces to work in, and a well-designed truck also has to be very versatile. Back in my day, everything was analogue and lots of heavy multicores to handle all the audio channels. How I wish we had all the improvements that digital and especially Audio over IP has brought.

If I was still working now for me, the Spirtitland One truck is what I would want for Christmas. Completed in 2019, Spiritland One, is a fully-featured, state-of-the-art Outside Broadcast vehicle for audio and video projects of any scale. It is a bespoke 11-metre Mercedes vehicle designed by the Spiritland team, in collaboration with SSL and Dolby to deliver an accurate listening environment capable of mixing for Dolby Atmos surround. Spiritland drew on their directors' experience of many years using the BBC OB fleet as well as other OB trucks to create something that allowed them the space and tools to create the mixes they couldn't in other facilities.

Features include:

• An 800 path capable SSL audio console for the most demanding productions

• Redundant 256 channel multitrack recording

• HD video capable including production switcher and multiple recorders

• Dolby Atmos (DP590) 7.1.4 Neumann monitoring with Barefoot MM27 main monitors

• A full complement of SSL pre-amps with fibre delivery

It has extensive sound processing options with the entire Waves plugin library and outboard from Bricasti, Eventide, Klark Teknik and Al Smart. All internal i/o within the truck is provided by a Focusrite RedNet system.

There’s a host of options for production teams, including a full wireless comms system, multiple headphone points, printer, fridge, production wifi and a serious coffee machine.

Antony Shaw, Co-Founding Director of Spiritland Productions, explains…

“From the point at which the inputs hit the SSL mic pre's, the infrastructure on Spiritland One is all RedNet. The advantages of using RedNet for this are significant: we've considerably reduced the weight of equipment and the amount of cabling, both of which are critical in a production-truck environment. Also, the newer RedNet devices are fitted with redundant power, which is also very necessary in remote production. Plus, with the RedNet infrastructure, we no longer have to deploy separate sample-rate converters on productions. The user interfaces are straightforward and simple, to the point of plug and play, which is another advantage with the rapid pace of remote work."

The RedNet devices aboard Spiritland One are installed across the rig's eight onboard racks, with several A16R and D16R units in the main rack, all of the D64R units in another rack, and more A16R and D16R interfaces in a rack near the metering displays.

Anthony continues…

“The RedNet devices take up so little real estate aboard the truck, considering how powerful they are, another thing that makes them very attractive to remote work. RedNet's new generation of interfaces also lets us prepare for the next generation of audio, in the form of immersive formats such as Dolby's Atmos. Spiritland One represents a real turning point in the technology of remote production, and RedNet is the glue joining it all together."

Spiritland One is split into two rooms – a mix room at the front and an engineering room at the back. It is great to see the attention given to providing a comfortable working environment, including the ergonomics of the System T touchscreen interfaces. Anthony explains…

“The way that the SSL handles the monitoring of Dolby Atmos is very good; there are so many monitoring sources on that desk. Another thing that attracted us to it was that you can use the universally loved SSL bus compressor in 5.1.4 mode. A lot of mixes we’ve been hearing from rock gigs mixed in Atmos haven’t glued together particularly well, but being able to use the SSL compressor on all those buses is changing that.”

As already mentioned, the truck runs entirely on a Dante network. Spiritland One uses a BroaMan point-to-point fibre transport system to connect the truck with the stagebox, providing bi-directional, multi-format, multi-signal transport via a quad fibre cable. BroaMan Technical Sales Manager, Maciek Janiszewski explains…

“This is a bespoke truck and the specific configuration of each device was equipped with 12 3G-SDI coax ports – which can be used for video or Madi – and six bi-directional SFP slots which can be populated with any SFP transceiver to transport different signals”.

The Spiritland team chose the SSL System T, based on its sonic performance, and knew the infrastructure needed to be end-to-end IP. Anthony Shaw explains…

“This would allow us to be very flexible with our I/O design and adapt the truck to the job or client’s needs; we can easily add additional inputs or have multiple locations or stages. Having witnessed how well the BroaMan/Optocore system fitted on the BBC Scotland DSV OB truck, we investigated how it could help us cut down on the amount of fibre needed between our truck and stage boxes.”

Space in an OB truck is always at a premium, and so the choice of BroaMan and RedNet have enabled the Spiritland team to save space and weight as well as create a very versatile and reliable mobile facility.

“The BroaMan solution has absolutely been a success. It just worked straight out of the box, and a 1U box in the truck and at the stage has really streamlined our stage delivery system. We had all our connectivity on two opticalCon Duo SM Fibres, and it hasn’t dropped a beat. I would thoroughly recommend these products.”

A more recent addition to the Spiritland One truck is a pair of DAD Core 256 interfaces. Previously, they could record 2 x 128 channels with a 256 channel backup. The addition of the DAD Core256 has enabled them to offer 256 record channels in triplicate as part of the standard rig. It acts as the I/O for both primary and backup recorders, with four JoeCo DANTE units acting as a secondary backup. Antony Shaw added…

“The ability to record this many channels in triplicate with such reliability enables us to keep our focus on the sound of the show rather than worrying about whether everything is going to be recorded.”

The Core 256 has been an excellent addition as the size of shows that the truck is being used for continue to get larger. This means the previous channel record count of 128 was no longer enough especially when they need to accommodate multi-band setups and capture all incoming channels as well as mix stems and masters.

Examples for the company include the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo 2022, which used a total of 234 tracks with musical shows for both BBC One and Magic Radio, now regularly using more than 200 channels, with the BBC Big Night of Musicals show using all 256 channels.

Immersive formats are growing in popularity as a component of recording live shows that significantly increase the channel count. When mixing shows live in immersive formats, the biggest issue is the number of channels used by mix stems needed to build their ‘bed’ output. Spirtland is now able to fit the majority of shows, including Atmos 5.1.4 mix stems, into a single project using the Core 256.

Currently, the DAD Core 256 is used with Mac Studio M1 Max via Thunderbolt, running Reaper. To test the reliability, Spiritland Productions recorded 256 channels on every session with Multicast traffic in the Dante setup, usually between 350-600 Mbps. The Core 256 is used at both 48kHz and 96Hz without any issues. Anthony added…

“The device was unboxed and installed on site on the rig day of a show and was up and running within 10 minutes of being turned on. We then routed 256 channels of audio and ran it for 12 hours straight without a single dropout or error. This, for us, ticked both the ease of use and reliability criteria. We love it!”

Congratulations to ex BBC sound supervisors Gareth Iles and Antony Shaw for designing a state-of-the-art dedicated audio truck that looks good, too.