Adlib first 'met' 5SOS at the 2014 Summertime Ball event at Wembley Stadium in London where they were co-ordinating all things audio. The band's FOH engineer John Delf, asked Adlib's Ben Booker to mix monitors for the band's headline shows at London's Islington Academy and then Birmingham Academy 2. This was back in October 2013. At this point Ben saw the potential of the band and jumped on board full time.
Ben and John Delf were extremely happy when Adlib was chosen for this, 5SOS's first major headlining European production tour.
John Delf specified the L-Acoustics K1 system after hearing it used at the 2014 Summertime Ball. The seven week arena tour traversed through Europe and the UK, culminating in three sold-out shows at Wembley Arena.
Adlib sent out one of their typically strong crews on this tour, with Tony Szabo (KSE) as system designer and engineer, being supported by Sam Proctor. Their usual configuration was main arrays of 14 x K1 speakers with four Kara downs, and side-arrays containing 12 x K2 each.
These were complimented with powerful sub array comprising nine SB28 s per side, built in stacks of three sitting on bespoke dollies for optimum manoeuvrability and convenient placement beneath the rolling stage system.
In and out-fills were four ARC2 speakers, positioned on top of the middle sub stacks, with Karas for stage lip-fill, and also for out-fills on the outer sub stacks.
John chose one of Adlib's Soundcraft Vi3000 consoles to create the mix, utilizing the Soundcraft Realtime Rack for various additional UAD plug ins as inserts. The show was multi-track recorded every night via Dante out of the Vi3000. #dantespokenhere
One of Adlib's standard Lake Control Systems were used which utilises fibre to run Dante to the various speakers zones, with the Lakes being used for EQ and time alignment. This control system comprises of three Lake LM44s as a FOH matrix, sending Dante to two Lake LM 26s and a Focusrite RedNet D16R per side of stage distributing AES3 audio to all the L-Acoustics LA8 amplifiers.
A DiGiCo SD10 was monitor engineer Ben Booker's console of choice, used in conjunction with a 48-input Adlib line system.
The band use six channels of Sennheiser 2000 series IEMs, three on one frequency range and three in another - giving one complete spare for each of the band. When travelling worldwide this allows them to use the best possible range in that area.
(Jim Evans)
