British audiences are traditionally more reserved about 'challenging' music, but Archive's live shows are extremely popular in continental Europe. On the band's latest tour, Jones has been manning two digital consoles at the FOH position - a Digidesign Profile for the band and an Innovason Eclipse mixing digital microphones for an accompanying orchestra. Both are digitally linked, with the latter as the master console and an Apex Intelli-X² 48 inserted to EQ house PA systems in the tour's venues.
"I have been using it on tour for a couple of weeks and really like it," he says. "We've been using the word clock to sync the console and as the master EQ in AES mode. At the last show I used it in analogue mode and it produced great results in cleaning up the old club system sound."
Blending the orchestra with the band's electric instruments is invariably a challenge, but the Intelli-X² has provided considerable advantages over 'traditional' processors.
"The compression and notch filtering of key frequencies has been a great help in mixing Archive's musicians with the orchestra," Spike continues. "Compared with an old analogue graphic EQ I was using, the clean sound is so refreshing."
(Jim Evans)
