Dizzee wit da D2!

It’s not often that a trip to Cornwall literally changes a sound engineer’s professional life, but exactly that happened in May this year to Chuck ‘Knowledge’ Boyle, live production manager and front of house engineer for rap star Dizzee Rascal.

In preparation for a full tour plus festival dates to promote his new album Maths + English, Rascal played eight ‘Dirtee Stankin’ UK dates in May and June. The dates used locally-sourced audio equipment and it was at Falmouth’s Stannery venue that Chuck found himself using an XTA D2 dynamic equaliser.

“I’d been hiring other EQs and compressors, but the D2 just blew everyone away. It made such a difference.” says Chuck. “It looks and sounds analogue, the limiting stage is super soft, the metering is beautiful and it’s great to set up. We put it across the entire system and it sounded fantastic. It was a brilliant piece of kit.”

“Having both analogue and digital ports is a big advantage and I realised that here was also a way to record the shows in the highest possible audio quality.”

Chuck was so impressed that swiftly got his own D2. And very quickly it was proving that it is not only the audio quality that is unsurpassed. “I’d had the D2 such a short time that, when we went to Europe, it was still in its original box,” says Chuck.

“We had to go through Copenhagen three times in all and every time our luggage went missing. Each time the D2 ended up going halfway around Europe and the UK before it finally got back to me. It came back with the packaging absolutely wet through on one occasion. My clothes were ruined, but the D2 was absolutely fine. That gave me a huge amount of confidence in the build quality.”

Not only that, but Chuck is also full of praise for XTA’s customer service, his particular requirements pushing the abilities of the D2 a little further than are supplied as standard. “I’ve had a lot of discussions with the XTA guys, Stuart [Down] and Phil [Key] in particular,” he says. “I found it wasn’t possible to run the digital and analogue outputs at the same time, but that would be a really useful facility for me. So I phoned XTA, to ask if they could modify my D2.