Björk kicked off her recent Utopia tour of Europe with back-to-back dates in her in hometown of Reykjavik, before hitting major festivals including All Points East in London and Primavera Sound in Barcelona. During the 11-show tour, Galeforce Sound FOH engineer John Gale employed two RME Madiface interfaces to manage Madi I/O over USB 2.0.
Gale used the main and spare I/O into dual Pro Tools rigs for live vocal and flute effects, which were dealt with in time coded Pro Tools sessions running specific plug-ins. ‘The Madiface USB has been rock solid,’ he reports. ‘The key thing for me is the solid drivers and physical reliability. RME products have always sounded fantastic, but their reliability is what sets them ahead of the rest.’
In addition to reliability, low latency is critical for Gale – for live performance, he needs to pass audio in and out of Pro Tools without any pops, glitches or perceived delay: ‘We experimented with the buffer sizes to find a low setting that was rock solid,’ he explains. ‘I’m using the Madiface in this situation for the vocal effects, like reverb and delays, on Björk’s vocal microphone and also the live effects on the flute ensemble. I’m also sending these effects back to Björk’s monitor engineer so it has to be as low latency as possible as she’s monitoring this on stage.’
RME’s TotalMix software enables unlimited routing and mixing to the company’s audio interfaces – invaluable to Gale and Musical Director Matt Robertson during rehearsals and pre-show checks.
‘The musicians on stage have TotalMix set-ups too, so that they can listen to their own mixed outputs, without having to have the monitor engineer switch to a particular scene or snapshot,’ Robertson says. ‘There is also some very clever stuff you can do with TotalMix to route time code to various outputs and even back into the same device. If you need a duplicate time code output on 36, it’s easy to route it in TotalMix without having to make any changes to your playback session.’
Gale purchased his first Madiface in 2008 and has used it on hundreds of tours as well as tracked live albums for artists that have then gone onto commercial release, as well as for virtual soundchecks.
‘RME products are so reliable it took me until this year to finally retire the HDSPe Madiface I purchased nearly ten years ago only because I changed my computer,’ Gale says. ‘I swear by them.’
He has used other Madi-based recording devices from other manufacturers, but often found himself up against issues such as the inability to receive a certain BNC Madi stream, yet his RME Madiface would read the same Madi stream without trouble.
‘Additionally, the drivers are so solid. I’ve used other products where I’ve had to keep reinstalling the drivers every few days, but with the Madiface I can’t remember ever having an issue,’ Gale says. ‘They simply work and that, to me, is the most important thing – solid reliability and confidence that, come show time, it will work every time.’
More: www.rme-usa.com
