Peter Gabriel’s New Blood, Scratch My Back Tour saw the artist and a 54-piece orchestra performing cover songs in amphitheaters and arenas throughout Europe. Due to the complexities of delivering orchestral sound to a large arena audience, Brit Row Productions chose Audinate Dante to help control the zones. Front-of-house engineer Richard Sharrat used nine sends from the DiGiCo SD7 to Dante-enabled products; a Yamaha DME 64 with a Dante-MY16-AUD transferred the AES outputs of the console to the Dante network. Final system EQ was via two Dolby Lake Processors running MESA EQ modules to an additional five Lake Processors and a Lab.gruppen LM26 acting as crossovers for the P.A.—all distributed via Dante over single-mode fiber.
Dante was also employed in the multimedia and video aspects. When an audio feed was required, the sound engineers plugged an Ethernet cable into a conveniently located switch, set up the patch on Dante Controller and gave the video crew a clean feed without having to consider complex routing or topology issues. “Using Dante on a tour of this size makes load-in and load-outs much faster, is easy to use and understand, and, most of all, gives me the kind of audio control I could only dream about a few short years ago,” says Brit Row Productions systems tech Josh Lloyd.
