With rave reviews accompanying their tour of North America, Kraftwerk are now touring throughout Europe. Performing 3-D concerts in support of The Catalogue 12345678 eight-CD retrospective box set, the concerts are being billed as ‘the most spectacular and innovative’ of their 45-year career.

The PA set-up was designed by d&b audiotechnik’s Ralf Zuleeg as spatial sound system. The core is a Fraunhofer-based spatial audio processor. Zuleeg has used DirectOut’s Andiamo converters for a number of different spatial audio applications in the past in order to convert the Madi signals from the processor to AES3 and then out to d&b amplifiers.

Kraftwerk production manager Winfried Blank had chosen to put DirectOut Andiamo 2.XT AES/Madi AD/DA converters on the tour in early 2014 – but with extended routing functionality: ‘We are working with digital audio signals from the source to the output,’ he says. ‘Our periphery is Madi, and my idea was to travel via fibre from a couple of RME Madiface XTs to DirectOut’s Andiamo 2.XT and from there via AES3 to the d&b amplifiers.

‘The DirectOut Andiamo 2 series supported Madi port redundancy, but the converters didn’t allow me to collect Madi signals from two independent domains and convert them into AES3 to distribute the AES signals via a matrix to the amps. So I asked the DirectOut development team if they could adapt the Andiamo Remote software to meet my requirement. The guys were very open-minded since it was a feature they were convinced many of their users and clients would appreciate.’

DirectOut software developer Claudio Becker-Foss made the necessary software changes, which are now standard in all Andiamo 2 units: ‘After an internal discussion about Winfried Blanks request, we quickly came to the conclusion that all Andiamo 2 converters with two Madi I/Os should benefit from the extended routing functionality,’ Becker-Foss confirms. As a result, the complete Andiamo 2 line was upgraded so that now all DirectOut customers can benefit from the ‘Kraftwerk’ request.

Since then, Kraftwerk has extended their DirectOut inventory with more Madi equipment in order to enhance their Madi networking capabilities” ‘We recently bought a Split.Converter to mirror incoming Madi Signals to different outputs,’ Blank says. ‘Furthermore, we are using the new Anna-Lisa Madi analyser to control the amplitude and the jitter of our Madi signals’.