Doug McClement, chief recording engineer at Toronto’s LiveWire Remote Recorders, was part of the team that helped bring the music alive for viewers tuning into the Rolling Stones SARS concert that took place at Downsview Air Force Base on July 30.

McClement helped record the show for co-host broadcasters CBC and MuchMoreMusic. The team had to work fast – the TV broadcast was only confirmed four days before it had to be set up. The LiveWire team was on-site for three days: one for setup, one for sound check and one for the show and subsequent teardown.

The audio supervisor was David Hewitt, from Remote Recording Services, based in Pennsylvania. Hewitt assembled a master mike chart based on instructions from each of the 14 bands performing.

The task of recording individual bands was divided up among trucks from LiveWire and Remote Recording as well as the CBC Radio Mobile. Using three trucks allowed for quick 15-minute set changes between acts. Some of the bands, including the Stones and Rush, had complicated setups incorporating some 70 inputs. The trucks simultaneously sent out a stereo mix to the CBC video truck, which fed the show out to CBC TV, MuchMoreMusic and CBC Radio.

All three trucks were recording digitally on hard drives at 96kHz/24-bit and backing up on digital tape at 44.1kHz/16-bit. McClement recorded across 48 tracks directly to SCSI hard drives and then transferred to Quantegy FHD hard drives for backup and delivery, and recorded to Quantegy DA8 digital audio mastering tapes. McClement says he opted for Quantegy drives for their packaging and built-in power supply.

There will, of course, be a DVD version of the show. To that end, eight audience mikes were used to record onto separate tracks on an SMPTE-locked Tascam DA-88. The DVD will be mixed by veteran Stones recording engineer Ed Cherney in New York.

McClement, a six-time Gemini Award nominee, has been hired as audio supervisor on The Toronto Show, airing on Toronto 1.

-www.livewire-remote.com/

-www.quantegy.com