The first French band to perform at the Stade de France, French rock band Indochine also count 10m record sales among their achievements. That 2010 crowd of 80,000 people is only part of an audience that has flocked to witness uses of sound, light and video not normally seen at a rock show – most recently on their Black City Tour, which concluded with a return the Stade for two mammoth shows

The tour had taken singer and leader Nicolas Sirkis, and the rest of the band across Europe and around the world. Alongside 360° projection mapping and creative lighting, the sound was delivered by DiGiCo, Adamson, Lab.gruppen and Lake, united by Dante digital audio networking.

PA system-tech Julien Poirot has worked on shows and tours around the world, providing PA support to Linkin Park and Metallica, and events including Sonisphere. Having worked with Indochine before, he returned to design the system for Black City Tour with Wilfried Lasbleiz.

‘This is one of the biggest bands in France, and it was an interesting job because of all the lighting and video screens, and we had to configure the PA around that,’ he says. ‘I’ve used many different PAs – from Meyer Sound and JBL to L-Acoustics – but nowadays I only use Adamson.

‘Since we have such a good relationship with the management and tour production team for Indochine, it was really easy to propose things…’

Of the proposals put forward, sound engineer Philippe Dubich selected Adamson E15 and E12 line arrays and T-21 subs, provided by French rental company Lagoona. The system was powered by dedicated racks per side with Lab.gruppen PLM 20000Q and PLM 10000Q.

‘What I like about the E15 is that it’s a very loud, powerful box, with a nice dynamic and crisp definition,’ Poirot  explains. ‘For most of the shows, we had a main PA and delay hangs. We used a line array, but in this case we wanted to hit all of the top seats and make sure the whole audience got the same sound. We could separate the delay hangs out and tune and adjust them separately from the main hangs. We used the T-21 subs, ground stacked, with ten subs each side. The main system was just in front of the subs, so the phase was very good because everything was in line. And powering that, we used Lab.gruppen PLM amplifiers on all the tops, 20k on the main PA, Adamson E15, and we used 10k for all the front fills, down fills, side fill and delays. On subs, we used only the FP 7000, with a Lake LM26 as crossover, and of course, everything is running on Dante. The Digico SD7 console fed into the Dante network through a Lake LM44, giving the whole system full redundancy.’

With his chosen loudspeaker system in place, it was Lab.gruppen power that ensured Poirot, and the band themselves, got the kind of sound they wanted from it: ’I think using Lab.gruppen is just the best way to have dynamics on the lows, good attack on the subs. It’s the only amp I can use that gives me that. Comparing the LA8 for example, the Lab.gruppen just gives that strong, punchy sound that others can’t match.

‘Now with the PLMs, we have all the Lake Processing inside, which is amazing, as Lake is just the most powerful processing tool on the market. Now it’s compact, powerful, and we only need two racks on either side of the side to power the whole show. It makes it so easy to use on tour, as we just roll them off the truck, power them up, and we’re ready to go.

‘Lake makes it easy to tune the system to suit any venue. On other amps, you might get eight or ten parametric EQ points, and sometimes it’s not enough as the venue might be really hard on the lows. With Lake you don’t get this problem, as there isn’t that kind of limitation. Having the PLMs means that we can do exactly what we want, when we want, and be confident that it’s going to work every time. Also the load monitoring on the PLMs is superb. Here, we had cable truss everywhere for audio, and you could check everything just by pressing the button on the amps and comparing the impedance. You have real time access to all the information, and when you are in show, it’s a great tool to have at your disposal.’