Live sound for Acoustic Trio

[mherma04]

Hi everybody.

I've been working with an acoustic trio - Violin, Double Bass, Guitar (The String Contingent) who play complex chamber music at big festivals where they need to plug into the PA.

They each have a DPA 4099 (super cardioid condenser mics) and the guitar also has a DI. We have played around with mic position to achieve the best frequency balance while trying to maintain good gain before feedback. Each of the instruments, however, have their own inherent problems (e.g the Double Bass resonates at 136Hz (C#), the violin E string is quite strident around 4kHz etc.).

The band really wants to be able to eliminate these problems before the mic signal gets to the mixing console so as the mix engineer has a much easier time making them sound great!

I have looked around and have been unsuccessful in finding a preamp/EQ box/channel strip (with +48 phantom power) that would be suitable to take on the road that has at least 2 bands of fully parametric EQ (gain, freq. select & Q).

The presonus EQ3B would be great if it could deal with condenser mic's.
The presonus EUREKA would be fine though they wouldn't need the compressor section, and it has delicate tubes in it which wouldn't be ideal to take on the road, and it would be great to have something more compact!

Does anyone have any suggestions??

I would love to see a compact 3 or 4ch digital stage processor box (gain, EQ, compression & levels inside) with XLRs in & mic level XLRs out (to go straight into the multicore) which you could 'preset' in a studio to account for the idiosyncrasies of the mic/instrument combo being amplified on stage. It would have to be super low latency especially if the band is being mixed on another digital console with latency!

Thoughts, comments, suggestions?
Thanks!
Mischa