Solid State Logic System T at the Heart of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, Featuring 22 Performers over 20 Consecutive Nights

Top talent over 20 consecutive nights

This year’s concert lineup offered music across a variety of music genres from artists including George Strait, Brad Paisley, Marshmello, Chris Stapleton, Khalid, Gwen Stefani, Dierks Bentley, Journey, Los Tucanes de Tijuana, Ricky Martin, Tim McGraw, Keith Urban and others. Houston-based country music artist Cody Johnson became only the third performer to sell out an opening night show at RodeoHouston, pulling in a crowd of 70,554 and going into the record books alongside George Strait and Garth Brooks. Strait broke his own RodeoHouston record with his 31st appearance, playing this year’s closing night to an audience of 79,452, only 650 fewer than his 2019 attendance record.

Each night’s concert at NRG Stadium follows rodeo competitions that take place on dirt trucked in and laid on the floor of the venue at the beginning of the three-week schedule. At the conclusion of each evening’s tournaments, an automated, motorized, 120-foot-wide stage in the shape of a five-pointed star moves into place with the night’s music production already set up. This year, to enable the transport of each artist’s audio from the stage to Harper’s music control room, connected by fiber optic cabling nearly a half mile away, SSL supplied a selection of its digital and analog interfaces capable of handling and converting a variety of formats.

The ultimate in flexibility

“Part of the challenge is being ready for anything,” says George Horton, SSL’s Vice President, Western Region. “We don’t know what brand of console artists are going to come with, or what sample rate or flavor of split they’re going to provide.” To accommodate any eventuality, he says, SSL supplied several units from the company’s Network I/O line of products, which were housed in a rack at the side of the stage next to the monitor mix position and fed the System T over a single mode fiber link.

Two Network I/O MADI Bridge devices, with built-in sample rate conversion, were available to each accept 64 channels of 48 kHz audio, supporting a total of 128 inputs. Each MADI Bridge could alternatively take in two 32-channel streams at 96 kHz and combine them into a single 64-channel 48 kHz Dante stream, between them handling 128 channels of 96 kHz MADI if required, Horton says.

“We also provided an HC Bridge SRC, an optically-isolated Dante bridge. If someone came in with a Dante split, we could take up to 256 Dante channels at 48k or 96k,” he says.