LEICESTERSHIRE, U.K. – The 9th Annual Download festival drew more than 70,000 over three days to Donington Park in central England to hear Def Leppard, Pendulum, System of a Down, Linkin Park, Alice Cooper and others. SSE Audio again supported the event, but this year with a digital network enhanced by the Dante compatibility available via the Lake LM 26.
Dante is a combination of software, hardware and network protocols developed by Audinate that is designed to deliver uncompressed, multi-channel, low-latency digital audio over a standard Ethernet network. Dante is designed to have many advantages over traditional analog audio distribution. Analog audio transmission can be adversely affected due to electromagnetic interference, high-frequency attenuation, and voltage drop over long cable runs. With digital audio distribution over Dante, the audio arrives unaffected at the other end.
"The main thing that we were trying to achieve was to integrate everything into one system, and use one fiber backbone for all of the subsystems that make up the PA returns," said Simon Gladstone, technical manager at SSE. "Obviously, at no point did we want it to give us less features or flexibility than we have been used to, and ultimately, we want the system to have a superior sound quality. Being able to use the Dante has enabled us to achieve one part of that, and obviously using the Dante has meant that we didn't need to have 150m of copper inserted into the signal path and degrading the quality."
For the third year, SSE Hire used their L-Acoustics K1 line-array system, with a Dolby Lake Processor linking all the desks at Front of House, plus an LM 26 also at FOH handling Dante transmission. Onstage, two LM 26s either side gave SSE the required analogue outputs feeding audio into the LA8 amplifiers. This allowed digital audio to be run via Dante down SSE's own fiber optic network between FOH and stage, running analog back into them as redundant back-up only.
With a minimal amount of processing to achieve the desired sound, everything then ran through the main FOH system comprising of a hang of a dozen L-Acoustics K1 per side, plus a half-dozen K1- SB elements, as well as side hangs of KUDOs and stacked SB28 subs in cardioid arrays. V-DOSC was deployed as delay hangs, supported by SB28 subs with KARA modules for front fill.
The use of LM 26, with the benefits of the Lake Processing and Dante that this brought, elicited favorable comments about the improved sound quality on-site, as Gladstone affirmed. "As soon as we switched it on, everyone noted the improved audio quality. As the weekend went on it became apparent that there was a lot more HF presence in the system, which you didn't get with the analogue system. I can only put that down to a hundred meters of copper degrading the HF in the analog domain."
Along with letting users route the audio signal in a digital format, the LM 26 also provided a dual redundancy function, meaning that in the unlikely event of any failures of the digital signal, the LM 26 would have automatically switched to analog, a backup factor that SSE considered essential to have in place for such a major event such as Download.
"We used an analog backup system on the Chase and Status tour, but you would have had to physically re-patch the wires," Gladstone said. "This is the first time we'd actually used it within the LM 26s themselves, and we're all impressed at how quickly it switched to analog when we pulled both fibers just to test it. It was literally less than half a second of audio lost, and then it came back straightaway on the analog system. As with all new technology, until something is proven in the field, it's vital to be able to revert to something tried and tested, as in this business delivery is everything and this gave us the peace of mind we need."
Nick Pain, the SSE System Engineer who ran the sound at Download this year, was also very impressed with the performance of the LM 26s units. He said, "Download 2011 is the best I have ever heard the system sound. The HF and overall presence is far better than we have previously had with long runs of analog, and on Dante it is excellent. One other thing that I was impressed with was the redundant switch over. It's reassuring knowing that there's an automatic backup transmission path in case things go wrong. In fact, a lot of guys commented on how good the sound was. Nothing is different in the system except the LM 26s."
For more information, please visit www.lakeprocessing.com and www.sseaudiogroup.com.
