Europe - Canadian front of house engineer Matt Blakely is the owner of Prodigy.MP for his personal live audio processing. Blakely has over 20 years’ experience and his latest tour with Billy Talent had dates worldwide, throughout the summer.
A chance encounter initially made him think about his audio interfacing and after trying Prodigy.MP, he says he will never go back. It is not just the hardware that withstands the demands of a worldwide tour, the relationship and support he gets from DirectOut means other solutions cannot compete.
“It all started when my preferred interface became unsupported,” Blakely recalls. “I can’t remember who suggested I tried the Prodigy.MP, but I gave it a go for driving the PA. It is a great, simple solution for festivals, but even more useful when we’re touring our own PA as we can have full control of our mix with the 16 by 16 matrix.”
The Prodigy.MP proved to be a singularly robust solution that would serve all the band’s interfacing needs. It was much more capable than Blakely first realised, and a training session in Toronto showed him just how much it could do. One of the features that he now uses most often is the intuitive sample rate conversions for upscaling sample rates between devices.
“We benefitted from training with Luca Giaroli at the Canadian distributors for DirectOut. The workflow was so simple and it just made sense,” he says. “When we’re working with broadcast, we can send the signal digitally from the console, through the Prodigy.MP, which will clock it and figure out the rest, seamlessly upscaling or downgrading sample rates as needed.”
Blakely soon realised the Prodigy.MP could replace several separate devices, streamlining his touring setup and giving him peace of mind in any situation with its multilevel redundancy concept. The Prodigy.MP benefits from dual power supplies, input managers and EARS (Enhanced Automatic Redundancy Switching). Thanks to the addition of his RAVENNA module, Blakely also utilises uninterrupted backup streams.
“It really is a powerful piece of equipment and it’s important to have those backups. The Prodigy.MP does everything I need seamlessly. It drives the PA, interfaces between analogue and digital kit, runs backups, and all within a 2U box,” he says. “It's been great since the day I started using it, which is going on for three years. It's been rock solid the whole time. It's great piece of kit.”
