Eighth Day’s Owen Orzack responded to questions from PSW Live section editor Chris Kathman, about the new facility that Eight Day has recently moved into.

Owen Orzack

How long had you been in your old warehouse? We had been there for over 13 years of our 21 years in business. Besides more space, what are the other advantages of the new place? When you move into a new location it’s like starting with a clean slate, which is great for a team mindset on what you do and how to do it better.

The biggest plus outside of this is that we own the facility and there is room to expand when the time comes; other advantages include a nicer, more accessible location, bigger parking lot, more truck docks, great office space with natural light and vastly improved telecommunications. We even got a new coffee maker!

I see on your website that you are also involved in corporate events and install activity, has that increased for you the last few years?

Absolutely. Eighth Day has always been heavily involved corporate events but I would say that is where we are seeking to grow the company most. Quite a few of these events usually involve some form of entertainment, in addition to business presentations and video playback, so it is a good fit. Our installations have mainly dealt with houses of worship and quite a bit over at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but we did recently put a kick ass home theatre in Drew Carey’s house.

What was the largest and most demanding job you did this year?

Prep area

On the entertainment side of things it would most likely be the annual WHFStival in Washington DC, which is the largest radio station festival in the country. This Memorial Day weekend they did it for 2 days at RFK Stadium with 11 acts on the main stage and 60,000 fans each day. This year’s blast saw Green Day, Coldplay, Incubus, 3 Doors Down, Fuel, Live, Staind, and Linkin Park among many others.

Corporate wise we did a very complex, multi-site trade show for a German firm called Heidelberg (the largest, most prestigious maker of printing presses in the world) involving extensive delay speakers, BSS Soundweb, in-ear monitors and digital consoles. That show tied up people and equipment for over 5 weeks.

Do you have some magician bench techs who keep the whole thing running?

I like to think all our folks are magical; by that I mean if sales doesn’t do their job there are no gigs, if engineering doesn’t do their job the product doesn’t work right, if accounting doesn’t do their job the bills don’t get paid, if the receptionist doesn’t do her job nobody gets to talk to anyone and it all goes to hell. Everyone here is important to our success. In specific terms of a bench tech we have a great guy named Dane who deals with all our consoles & electronics; he’s one of those guys who can walk past a PSU rack and tell you if it’s up to spec. On the tech/computer side of things Mark Brnich keeps us up, running and as current as possible (he’s the first employee Eighth Day owner Tom Arko hired 21 years ago). We also have support staff crew to deal with wiring, speaker service/recone, and rigging/chain hoists.

What new gear did you buy this year that met or exceeded your hopes for it?

We bought V-Dosc this year and are very pleased, from both a business and sonic standpoint. We added another Paragon P2 to our console inventory as well as more d&b audiotechnik C4 and C7 speakers. The equipment that has exceeded our expectations this year is the Lab Gruppen amplifiers that we bought to power all our V-Dosc; they are amazing sounding, powerful, lightweight amps that are far superior to the other amps approved by L’Acoustics for use with V-Dosc. Most European network partners have them but we are the only one over here, which we feel gives us a sonic edge on an already great sounding rig. I’m certain we’ll being acquiring more of those for other applications next year.