Having completed a sold-out UK tour and a successful run in the US, British singer-songwriter Ben Howard has returned to perform a series of arena dates in the UK – including three nights at London’s Alexandra Palace, Glasgow’s SSE Hydro, Cardiff’s Motorpoint Arena and Birmingham’s NIA.

With rental company Nitelites handling the sound, DiGiCo SD7 digital mixing consoles were used at FOH and monitors, with an L-Acoustics K2 loudspeaker system delivering the sound. ‘The band knows exactly what they want and we try very hard to give it to them,’ says Nitelites Director Andy Magee, who has been working with the singer since 2012, and takes FOH mixing duties with Barrie Pitt on monitors.

‘It’s always a challenge and every console we use is pushed to the limits of its performance. Almost all the band members are engineers and have worked in studios, so they push us really hard. It’s good for us because it keeps us sharp.

‘The SD7 sounds great,’ he continues. ‘There’s still nothing that comes close to it for performance and it still keeps getting better. The monitor console has 140 channels into 48 outputs at 96kHz and there’s no other console that can do that or the complicated routing we need.’

At FOH, the show made extensive use of automation from the SD7: ‘If things change during the show, I can hit a safe button and get exactly what I need,’ he says. ‘The band is great and the show sounds fantastic; the layering in the music is really subtle. With other consoles you just don’t hear everything with such depth.’

Magee’s SD7 has the addition of a Waves Soundgrid, along with a DiGiGrid MGB to multitrack every show to a MacBook, which he plays back to Ben each day. Barrie, meanwhile, has a Universal Audio Apollo 16 plug-in server with a DiGiCo Mini-Rack. Two SD9s are also being used as the support band consoles.

The L-Acoustics K2 system was chosen to satisfy the diverse requirements of the venues on the tour. ‘One really great thing with K2 is the new changeable horizontal directivity,’ Magee says. ‘We were going from very wide to very long venues, so being able to change the horizontal directivity and get more energy in the far field was great. With other fixed directivity products we would have struggled to get that.’

The general set-up used 16 K2 elements for the main PA with K2 side hangs, a centre cluster of 16 or 18 SB28 subwoofers, ARCS II groundstacked left and right, and Kara for fill. The monitor system included L-Acoustics SB28, with ARCS or Kara for side fill. For the arena dates, Nitelites increased the size of the PA, running up to 92 L-Acoustics cabinets, using a combination of 16 K1, plus K2 side hangs.

‘Since I started with Ben in 2012, we’ve always used L-Acoustics,’ Magee says. ‘On some of the smaller shows we did last summer we used Kara, and for the festivals run we had either K1 or V-Dosc. On Ben’s last tour, there were one or two small shows of around 1,500 capacity, everything else was between 2,500 and 8,000 and K2 was perfect for every one of those.

‘I’m always more satisfied with the results and consistency we get with L-Acoustics over other systems we’ve used,’ he adds. ‘I like as much control as possible and the K2 helps me do that.’

More: www.nitelites.co.uk
More: www.l-acoustics.com
More: www.digico.org