UK lighting and sound company Entec has extended its equipment inventory with the addition of a number ofLake LM 44 digital audio system processors

‘As a company, we are involved in a lot of different events, so any kit we invest in has to be both flexible and reliable,’ says Technical Engineer, Ed Hammond. ‘The graphic interface in the Lake Controller has always been amazing, and from the beginning, it’s that interface that people want at front of house. That demand drives what we put into our drive racks – which is the LM 44.

The UK’s longest established lighting and sound operation, Entec works across events ranging from concert tours, open-air festivals and corporate shows to exhibitions, television, theatre, branding exercises and religious gatherings. Recently projects have included Blur, Gorillaz, Slayer and the Bootleg Beatles.

‘I started using Lake Processing seven or eight years ago with the original Lake Contours, and my first experience of them was excellent,’ Hammond recalls. ‘Then the DLP came in, and that changed the game in terms of drive rack systems and crossovers.

‘We were looking to invest in the Dolby Lake technology, and when we found out that was getting phased out, we were very interested in seeing what product was going to replace it. With a company like Lab.gruppen driving the technology forward, they came out with the LM Series and we were very interested to see what it could do. The LM 44s came in for a demo, and we realised that you can stack them into a rack, and two of them equals a Dolby Lake 8/8 Mesa. In fact, you can go further than that, as well as the fact that all the units can all pick up each other’s Dante inputs.

‘That’s when we realised that the LM 44 was the unit for us, as we could scale it to the job at hand. We can have as many as we want at front of house or at the stage end, use them as a Dante breakouts if we need to do long signal runs. We use the AES in/out, so we keep the audio digital as much as possible now, and Dante is something that we’re going to look at going to in the future for our full return system, so the LM Series is perfect,’ he adds.