Southside, which took place in Tuttlingen in southern Germany, featured over 100 bands but with a distinctly more "alternative pop/rock" flavour. This time, around 60,000 fans turned out over three days to enjoy the music and a mix of sunshine and rain. DirectOut was on hand for the duration of both festivals to ensure seamless audio transmission from the stage to OB van for regional public broadcaster SWR.
DirectOut product manager Christian Müller was on site to assist SWR engineer Björn Lautenschlager throughout the two festivals to ensure that everything ran smoothly. "Both festivals had the same issue of long distances between the stage and the OB van," recalled Müller. "At Rock am Ring we needed to add more channels to the 60 we already had available on the Lawo stagebox. Fortunately there were still some fibre links free in the optical multicore, so rather than running several heavy copper cables, we decided on a further MADI transmission."
A DirectOut ANDIAMO.MC was used to amplify and convert the analogue signals to optical MADI and then into an ANDIAMO 2.XT for conversion into AES whereupon the signal could be received by the LAWO mc²66 console. Control was provided via USB Remote over MADI (ANDIAMO Remote). Björn Lautenschlager was pleased with the solution. "The stable and easy workflow with the ANDIAMOs and the Remote Software was a pleasure to work with," he said.
In addition to the long cable runs and requirement for additional channel count, which were solved in more or less the same manner as at Rock am Ring, Southside presented a different challenge. "We discovered that the monitor split for one of the bands was provided as two 32-channel 96kHz streams instead of the usual single 64-channel 48kHz stream, and cross-stage cabling only provided us with one link to transmit out to the OB van." recounted Müller. It was a bit of a surprise, but fortunately I happened to have a MA2CHBOX.XL with me which is a reference class headphone amp, but also handles format conversion and signal routing."
The solution was to put another sample rate converter (MADI.SRC) on stage which took the two 96kHz MADI streams from the monitor console (SSL Live) and converted and merged them down to a single stream at 48kHz. The MA2CHBOX.XL converted one of the two coaxial links into an optical signal to feed the optical input of the MADI.SRC. The 48kHz MADI stream was then transmitted from the MADI.SRC's output via the BNC cross stage line to a SPLIT.CONVERTER which converted the signal for the fibre link to the OB van.
(Jim Evans)
