Coldplay's Adventure Of A Lifetime With DirectOut

British rock band Coldplay began its demanding "A Head Full of Dreams" world tour in Buenos Aires on 04 December 2015.

The first leg of the tour took in six Latin American countries while the second extensive European leg commenced in Nice on 24th May. An American tour starts in July with 19 venues booked and in December it's the turn of New Zealand and Australia. Those guys are going to be exhausted when they wrap up in December.

Naturally, behind the scenes the control system must be totally reliable and resilient to cope with the stresses and strains of being perpetually on the move.

DirectOut Technologies MADI equipment features in every part of the control system and Infrastructure Designer Alex Hadjigeorgiou, on behalf of Wigwam Acoustics, remarked: "Coldplay has been touring with DirectOut stuff for 4 or 5 years now and the kit has always been reliable. You don't need to convince the client of the pedigree when more products come on line."

There are five DirectOut products in the control system. The M.1k2 MADI router takes care of the FOH Pro Tools recording of the virtual sound check/archive while the MADI.BRIDGE switches the Broadcast stems recording between two engines on the console.

The two EXBOX.BLDS (Buffer Loop Detection System) are part of the playback rig, seamlessly switching between the main and redundant playback streams in the event of a glitch or error. Originally the EXBOX.BLDS was introduced as part of the flyaway system because they are small, light and easy to use but they've proved their worth in such a way that they are now part of the main system.

The playback setup operates as an independent clock island so the system includes two MADI.SRC sample rate converters to deliver whatever sample rate the broadcasters, for example, require.

Finally, the Coldplay tour makes use of the renowned ANDIAMO AD<>DA converters to take the MADI output and send analogue to the broadcasters.

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(JP/LM)