Mixes Go Digital on Jimmy Kimmel Show

BUENA PARK, CA (December 20, 2004) ABC-TV's late-night hit, Jimmy Kimmel Live, goes beyond the typical celebrity talk fare to feature a range of today's top musical acts. Broadcast from the El Capitan Entertainment Center in Hollywood, the show has included guests such as Lenny Kravitz, The Roots, No Doubt, Coldplay and Toby Keith. Veteran engineer Bart Chiate handles multiple music mixes for Kimmel's seven-piece house band, plus any guest band performances each day. The main technical challenge is controlling the music from up to three distinct performance areas the theater lobby, the main stage thrust (camera left of Kimmel's position) and an outdoor stage.

Chiate handles multiple music mixes for Kimmel's seven-piece house band, and guest band performances from the theater lobby, the main and outdoor stages with three 02R96 units.

The music mix facility is a "command central" of sorts where Chiate, who has made the successful transition from records to touring to television, reigns supreme in the digital domain over the multiple stage setup. The system, installed by Paul Sandweiss' Sound Design Corporation, includes three Yamaha 02R96 digital mixing consoles encased in custom portable housing, a Steinberg Nuendo native-based broadcast / archive system, and 5.1 infrastructure which will provide a smooth transition when the network moves to HDTV with 5.1 audio.

The decision to move to the digital domain was based on consistency and experience. "I've been an 02R user for years," Chiate notes. "We used to do the American Music Awards with Paul's gear when he was still working 'analog,' and he made the switch after the 1996 show where we had to use seven separate analog boards. I don't like to reset things, so he came up with the idea of cascading three 02Rs. We upgraded to the 96k version for the 2003 broadcast, which are the units I use for the Kimmel show."

"I like the recall feature of the 02R96," he adds. "Because of the internal routing, I mix the house and guest bands off the same three boards, and sometimes the musical guests will perform with the house band. The house band goes through 40 channels of True brand mic preamps, which feed Yamaha MY-16 analog expander cards in the consoles. There's a second scene that routes from the 02R96's internal mic pres, so I'm basically running almost 100 inputs through 48 channels.

"I'm currently using the onboard processing gates, limiters but haven't tapped the onboard effects yet," Chiate explains. "I'm kind of old school, so my effects package comes from my Arsenio Hall days: eight Omni outs feed a Lexicon 200, a Yamaha Rev5, an H3000 and a Roland 880. The only external processing is a pair of 160As that go on the bass, Summit TLA100 and DCL units for vocals, and two TLA50s for saxophones."

Chiate uses two Nuendo 96/52 DSP PCI interface cards and six Nuendo DD8 format converters which interface with the three 02R96 mixers via AES/EBU, driven by Nuendo and Wavelab software. "With the Nuendo system, I can bring the entire show into the digital domain while broadcasting, remixing and archiving in high resolution multitrack format," he explains.

"The system records 48 simultaneous channels of 24-bit, 48kHz multi-channel audio from the various performance locations, so if I want to transfer from tape to computer and vice versa, its really easy. Generally, my show condition is just AES out to the format converters, and then straight back to the consoles, bypassing the recording chain."

"The best features of the 02R96 is versatility, and the fact that they're bulletproof," Chiate says. "Sound quality is very important to me, but in live television, there's nothing more important than reliability. You can't go back and 'fix it.'"

Jimmy Kimmel Live is beginning its third season. For more information, visit http://abc.go.com/primetime/jimmykimmel.

For more information on the Yamaha 02R96, write Yamaha Corporation of America, Professional Audio, P.O. Box 6600, Buena Park, CA 90622; telephone (714) 522-9011; e-mail infostation@yamaha.com; or visit www.yamahaproaudio.com.