The Django jazz club fires up every night in the depths below The Roxy Hotel in the Tribeca neighbourhood of Manhattan in New York City. An homage to the legendary jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, The Django jazz club is like stepping into an underground time machine. Distressed paint offsets ornate moulding and classy tables and chairs, making The Django feel like an out-of-the-way gem in mid-century Paris. To complement its visual aesthetic, The Roxy invested in a state-of-the-art Meyer sound reinforcement system, to which A/V integration firm Essential Communications recently added an Ashly Audio digiMIX24 digital mixing console.
“The Roxy is our client, and they were in the market for a new live mixer for The Django,” explained David Schwartz, president of Essential Communications. “They wanted all of the functionality and processing power of a large console, but they didn’t have a lot of physical room to put it. The Ashly digiMIX24 is compact and packs a ton of features into a small footprint. However, Ashly was very clever in the design so that all of the functionality appears seamlessly. It’s uniquely powerful, but also uniquely easy to use. They will use its full power for jazz shows, but they’ll also use its ‘EZ Mode’ for meetings and other events.”
Ashly Audio, long known for building rock-solid amplifiers, signal processors (both analog and digital), and user interfaces, actually started out in the early 1970s building live mixing consoles. Thus, in one sense, the digiMIX24 represents a return to Ashly’s roots. But in another sense, the digiMIX24 represents a very new development in Ashly’s catalog. It leverages all of Ashly’s recent history building powerful DSP and intuitive user interfaces and brings it to a market that is often short on both. In a nutshell, the Ashly digiMIX24 will give The Django tactile control, a touchscreen with intuitive menu architecture, 24 inputs, 14 mix buses, 32-bit conversion & processing, dynamics, equalization, digital effects, and easy scene recall.
In addition, the Ashly digiMIX24 comes with a free iPad remote control app. “The Django’s FOH engineer wanted to have the ability to walk around the club and mix remotely,” Schwartz said. “He wants to hear the mix from different perspectives; like looking at a work of art from different angles and under different lighting. You get a different vibe. He wants to make sure the mix is working from every vantage point.” Schwartz reports that the app connected with the digiMIX24 easily and reconnects reliably. Importantly, there is no detectable latency between changes made on the iPad and the mixer.
“I have lots of experience working with Ashly, and they’re always there whenever I need them,” Schwartz said. “That counts a whole lot with me. We almost never have problems with Ashly gear, but in the event that we do, they’ll have our backs. For example, we had an Ashly processor in place for a few years at another New York hotel and it recently started acting up. Ashly simply shipped us a replacement. That kind of service is worth a million dollars to me! I know I’ll get the same kind of support with The Django’s new digiMIX24.”
