Combining music, installation art, pyrotechnics, robotics and choreography, the Arcadia Spectacular is easily recognised by its gigantic Spider Stage. With a mission to ‘unite audiences on a journey through emotion, electricity and energy’, Arcadia brings together aerial acrobats, 50-ft fireballs and DJs in a curucible of creativity.

Responsible for recording Arcadia’s soundtrack is sound engineer Jonnie Parker, who describes the show as having ‘the busiest FOH environment I’ve ever worked in’ – something that lead him to rely on a remarkably compact (if powerful) mixing solution for the show’s recent stop in Bristol. Allen & Heath’s Qu-Pac rackmount mixer was Parker’s choice for the event, thanks to its blend of space-saving design and flexible.

‘It’s no cliché when I say that absolutely anything can happen during an Arcadia show,’ he explains. ‘So in order to be able to adapt to and overcome any eventuality – while not taking up more than my fair share of space in FOH – I need the Swiss Army Knife of the audio world. It needs to facilitate multi-track audio recording, whilst also offering the flexibility and toolset of a modern digital mixing console.

‘The Qu-Pac ticks all these boxes and more, and all in a compact, rack-mountable chassis with absolutely no space wasted on anything I wouldn’t need. For the Bristol show, I opted to use the Qu-Drive to record multitrack audio directly onto my USB hard drive rather than connecting the Qu-Pac as an audio interface to my laptop. This was for two reasons; once again because of how precious space is in the Arcadia FOH, and also in order to keep the recording system as simple as possible.

‘Qu-Drive was child’s play to set up and arm, and then happily recorded 18 tracks of audio for seven hours without a single hiccup or write error,’ he adds. ‘On importing the audio files into my DAW for postproduction the results are fantastic, and my initial audio bounces for the tight-deadlined after-event video edits sound dynamic and vibrant, capturing the atmosphere of the event in just the way I wanted.

‘All in all I’m very glad I chose the Qu-Pac – it’s compact, simple to use, reliable and powerful – it does everything I ask of it with plenty of routing capabilities and features. In the end the Qu-Pac didn’t just tick the boxes for the Arcadia Spectacular, it smashed them.’