The event was in fact made up of two separate shows. The first was a sunrise show broadcast from Victoria Dockside against the backdrop of the iconic Hong Kong skyline, which was recorded in one take on the previous day to prevent the gathering of large crowds. The second show at sunset was a rebroadcast of the sunrise show, followed by a fully live performance from inside the Hong Kong Coliseum.

Three SSL Live consoles were used across both shows — an L550 for live broadcast, L500 for band mix, and L350 for the artist’s personal IEM mix. Stability was always the main priority when it came to console choice, as sound engineer Frankie Hung — who has used SSL on almost all of his shows since 2014 — revealed:

“SSL desks are of course very stable and sound the best in terms of live consoles,” he says. “Because I’m a studio and a live guy, the L550 is the perfect fit for me. I use a lot of stem processing which is from studio style mixing, so I do all the routing for stem processing and FX offline. During sound check, I program snapshots for each song and I really like the flexible way in which I can recall safe individual parameters after I get a better understanding of the show.”

Setting up the three-console ecosystem for each show proved to be a simple task. Typically, Hung utilizes two complete sets of stage boxes: one for FOH, and another to serve band monitoring and IEM monitoring. The two monitor consoles shared inputs from SSL stage boxes via a Blacklight II Concentrator with redundant connections.

Meanwhile, SSL’s powerful Tempest processing platform gave Hung the flexibility to easily allocate resources for each show, while the console’s Super-Q, automation, and Quick Control features also proved invaluable during the live mix:

“The touch screen interface is fast and smooth,” said Hung. “I really love the smaller screen — a selection of buttons and encoders clearly turned this area into a dedicated channel-strip section, and having access to an at-a-glance view of the whole console’s signal flow was super helpful.”

Despite neither venue throwing up any major problems for the system, one big challenge for Hung was the need to provide a sound feed for various live broadcast platforms, including the local TV station, local radio station, YouTube, Facebook Live and Tencent.

“I fed them separately through different matrix outputs so that I could compensate for the signal depreciation in each broadcast platform,” Hung explained. “By using the virtual soundcheck function, I ran the mix with a round-trip audition and did different EQ and dynamic processing, just like how I do mastering in the studio.”