Slipknot, Foo Fighters, Motorhead and In Flames helped the Rock am Ring festival to mark its 30th anniversary – and new location – recently. Around 90,000 people came to see more than 150 bands playing over three days in Mendig, Western Germany. Southside, meanwhile, took place in Tuttlingen in Southern Germany where more than 100 bands offered a more ‘alternative pop/rock’ flavour to 60,000 fans
Both events saw DirectOut handling audio transmission from the stage to OB van for regional public broadcaster SWR.
‘Both festivals had the same issue of distance between the stage and the OB van,’ says DirectOut Product Manager Christian Müller, who was on site to assist SWR engineer Björn Lautenschlager throughout. ‘At Rock am Ring, we needed to add more channels to the 60 we already had available on the Lawo stagebox. Fortunately there were still some fibre links free in the optical multicore, so rather than running several copper cables, we decided on a further Madi transmission.’
A DirectOut Andiamo.MC was used to amplify and convert the analogue signals to optical Madi and then into an Andiamo 2.XT for AES conversion into a Lawo mc²66 MkII console. Control was provided via USB Remote over Madi (Andiamo Remote).
‘The Andiamos and the Remote Software was a pleasure to work with,’ says Lautenschlager. ‘The integrated level metering of the Remote Software meant that the engineer in the OB van was able to manage the levels of the additional channels, which was a really handy backup. However, the ability to control and remotely operate the Andiamo.MC from the mc²66 will provide us with a simple and elegant solution for the future.’
In addition to the long cable runs and requirement for additional channel count, which were addressed in more or less the same manner as at Rock am Ring, Southside added a further challenge: ‘We discovered that the monitor split for one of the bands was provided as two 32-channel 96kHz streams instead of the usual single 64-channel 48kHz stream, and cross-stage cabling only provided us with one link to transmit out to the OB van.’ Müller explains. It was a bit of a surprise, but fortunately I happened to have a Ma2chbox.XL with me which is a reference class headphone amp, but also handles format conversion and signal routing.’
The solution was to put another sample rate converter (Madi.SRC) on stage, which took the two 96kHz Madi streams from the monitor SSL Live console and converted and merged them into a single stream at 48kHz. The Ma2chbox.XL converted one of the two coaxial links into an optical signal to feed the optical input of the Madi.SRC. The 48kHz Madi stream was then transmitted from the Madi.SRC’s output via the BNC cross stage line to a Split.Converter, which converted the signal for the fibre link to the OB van. ‘It was a bit convoluted, but it worked perfectly!’ said Müller. Lautenschlager agrees. ‘We were all a bit taken aback when we realised the set-up on stage, but that’s festivals for you. You never get to know absolutely everything in advance. Fortunately Christian had a solution with the extra gear he’d brought with him just in case, and everything ran like clockwork. The Anna-Lisa signal generator was a real life-saver as it allowed us to monitor and line-check everything quickly and accurately, which is a real godsend during the short and usually frenetic changeovers at music festivals.’
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