If you watched Taylor Hicks and Katherine McPhee battle for the title of this year's American Idol at the Kodak Theater this week, you were listening to TC Electronic processing. For the second season in a row, industry veteran Paul Sandweiss, president of Sound Design Corp., engineered the music for the competition using TC Electronic processing.

Sandweiss' transportable mixing suite features three digitally linked Yamaha 02R 96Ks and a TC Electronic Reverb 6000, a "four-engine monster" for professional film and music production that can be controlled from a TC Icon Remote, a Mac or PC. TC Electronic's M5000 and M3000 provide all the reverb effects for the contestants and band, while a DBMax is strapped across the stereo buss.

"To keep it all fair, we had to use the same reverb program for every contestant," said Sandweiss. "We chose the Reverb 6000's DVR2 program, which is an amazing emulation of a vintage EMT250 because it sounded great on every singer. The TC DBMax also provides just the right amount of transparent compression so what we send over to final air mix rocks."

TC Electronic has headquarters in Denmark and in Westlake Village, Calif.