Sound Engineer for Legendary Crooner Takes Yamaha PM10 For a Test Drive

His heart may have been left in San Francisco, but the 91-year’s young crooner Tony Bennett hails from Astoria, Queens and still showing no sign of slowing down. On a recent stop at the Bayside Summer Night Series at the Embarcadero Marina Park South in San Diego, summer home to the San Diego Symphony, Bennett’s front of house engineer and production manager, Tom Young, had an opportunity to get his mixing hands on the flagship Yamaha RIVAGE PM10 Digital Audio Console, one of two that Hi-Tech Audio (Hayward, CA) has successfully placed at the venue for two years in a row. The consoles were provided to Meeting Services, Inc. (MSI), the audio production provider for the venue.

Young has a long history mixing on Yamaha consoles dating back to the PM1000. “The PM10 is sonically the best console product Yamaha has delivered to date, he says. The work surface is very logical and easy to navigate for anyone who has mixed on a CL5. As great as it sounded on my show in San Diego, it was even more evident how great it sounded when I had to land my next show two days later on another console.”

Hi-Tech Audio has also provided PM10 consoles at front of house and monitors for the Foo Fighters, the BottleRock 2017 Festival in Napa Valley, a pair of monitor consoles for Barry Manilow on a repeat basis via Delicate Productions, as well as corporate events with OSA and Cornerstone Technologies.

“We decided that Hi-Tech Audio would make PM10 a fully supported part of its rental inventory based upon the sound of the new mic pre and the Yamaha reputation for reliability, states Louis Adamo, co-owner, Hi-Tech Audio. It seems every engineer that has seen the console is drawn to it for the same reasons, and is ready to use it on their shows as soon as circumstances permit. The Yamaha approach to plug-ins is also attractive with a variety of choices that allow the user to ‘customize’ their console while avoiding the need to load third party software and licenses.”