“Saturday Night Live” Celebrates 50th Anniversary In Manhattan With DiGiCo & L-Acoustics
: Job Details :

“Saturday Night Live” Celebrates 50th Anniversary In Manhattan With DiGiCo & L-Acoustics

ProSoundWeb · EH Media LLC.

Job Location : New York,NY, USA

Posted on : 2025-08-06T01:05:47Z

Job Description :

A side view of the L-Acoustics loudspeaker system at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan that provided sound reinforcement for artists on the main turntable stage as well as additional performances on a third area downstage left.

“Saturday Night Live” Celebrates 50th Anniversary In Manhattan With DiGiCo & L-Acoustics

Firehouse Productions deploys system at Radio City Music Hall in support of SNL50: The Homecoming Concert headed by K2 arrays, KS28 subwoofers and more joined by four Quantum consoles.

The recent “SNL 50: The Homecoming Concert” marking the 50th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live,” broadcast live from Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, was supported by a sound reinforcement system deployed by Kingston, NY-based Firehouse Productions that was headed by L-Acoustics loudspeakers and DiGiCo consoles.

As much known for its musical performances as for its comedy, SNL has been a stage for live music throughout its five decades. Artists returning to perform for the event included Bonnie Raitt, Cher, Dave Grohl, David Byrne, Jack White, Jelly Roll, Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, and Ms. Lauryn Hill. Appearances by SNL comedy alumni counted John Mulaney, Dave Chappelle, Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Robert De Niro, with the ensemble hosted by one-time cast member Jimmy Fallon, who performed The Blues Brothers hit, “Soul Man.”

“For my career and for that of everyone who worked on that show, we knew we were not going to be around for SNL's 100th anniversary,” says Mark Dittmar, VP of sales for Firehouse Productions, which handled the live sound reinforcement for the three-hour event. “So it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work on a show that has absolutely crazy amounts of music, and at the same time huge amounts of sketch comedy, musical comedy, and dialog. Every note, every lyric, every word of every bit had to sound great and be totally intelligible to everyone in the house. And it was.”

Firehouse Productions brought in two each DiGiCo Quantum338 consoles for monitors and Quantum7 consoles for front of house, abetted by a dozen SD-Racks. These managed a total of seven 56-channel splitters between house and broadcast sound.

Two DiGiCo Quantum7 supplied the FOH mixes while two Quantum338 were used for monitors at Radio City Music Hall.

The event's L-Acoustics loudspeaker system comprised two hangs of 14 K2 each, one hang of 16 Kara II for the center channel, two hangs of nine KS28 subwoofers each, twin stacks of three KS28 for ground subs, 16 Kiva for front-fills, and four ARCS II for out-fills. The system, designed using L-Acoustics Soundvision software and managed by LA Network Manager on a Milan-AVB network, accommodated a turntable stage that enabled one artist to perform as the next one was setting up, with interstitial comedy and sketch performances taking place on a third performance area downstage left.

The pairs of Quantum7 and Quantum338 desks were split between each half of the turntable, with the third stage sharing their worksurfaces. The DiGiCo consoles' workflows gave the mixers – FOH engineers Jason Crystal, Jamie Pollock, and Dan Gerhart, with Mike Bove and César Benítez mixing monitors – what they needed to mix a range of music genres and performances on the fly.

“DiGiCo is the industry standard for a lot of performers, and the power of these desks is enormous,” Dittmar says. “The Quantum7 is unparalleled with the number of inputs and outputs it can handle. We had a total of seven 56-channel splitters feeding all of the I/O SD-Racks for this, so there was a huge amount of inputs and outputs that were being shared among these desks and at monitors, feeding over 40 in-ear mixes and 30 monitor wedge mixes, plus three sets of stereo side-fills. It was a huge amount of equipment and it takes a very big desk to accomplish that. Our engineers who were mixing the show are all intimately familiar with the DiGiCo line, specifically the Quantum desks, and they're very fast on them. That power is what allows them to work so fast.”

He also points to the contribution of the consoles' onboard processing: “That's what keeps us from having to patch in a lot of extra hardware, which slows the programming. The more you have outboard, the slower everything goes. The more stuff that you can keep in the desk, the faster they can patch and make changes and do what they need to do.”

Dittmar says it was the rehearsals that were intense: “The pace of rehearsals is tougher than the pace of the actual show because that's when you're building things, you're figuring things out,” he says. “A band is telling you that their input list changed, so we have to be able to be very, very fast with our ability to integrate those changes. This is the moment when it all comes together. From that, we build the snapshots that will make up the final show, and DiGiCo excels at that – being able to route things quickly and successfully. If all of a sudden we need dialog from a comedy act in the ears of someone on the upstage side, because they are going to have to react to the end of that comedy routine, we have to able do that quickly and accurately. So it's never just the band on the turntable at the moment – it's the entire show and everything that's going on around it. And DiGiCo lets us manage that.”

Radio City Music Hall was designed as an acoustically optimum environment for music, and the venue's management is selective when it comes to allowing temporary systems to be deployed there.

“Radio City's just such an amazing sounding place, it was imperative to have a system that performed well both musically and coherently,” he says, calling it “an honor and a spectacular experience” to bring an L-Acoustics system into that venue, and crediting Radio City's tech staff for their help in doing so. “Dialog needed to be at the right levels of volume and intelligibility. This audience was one of the most reactive I've ever seen in my career – and intelligibility is vital to getting that level of reaction to comedy bits. At the same time, fidelity is paramount for music. With L-Acoustics, we had both.”

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