Wigwam, who also handled the band's 2009 Viva La Vida tour, has purchased an additional five Optocore DD32R-FX digital interfaces - one for each of the five amp racks being deployed, which will all be connected by fibre.
Said Wigwam hire director, Chris Hill, "We will be running over 100 d&b D12 amplifiers in racks from five separate positions - some in the venue roofs and some on the ground - and programming in the delays etc. All will be connected to our Optocore returns system."
This will provide the band's FOH engineer Dan Green and systems engineer Tony Smith with a more elegant and stable solution. "The new DD32R-FX units offer a major advantage to running large scale systems such as we are deploying on Coldplay," commended Hill. "The ability to cable up to 700m between nodes when using multimode fibre transceivers - with network, audio, video and serial data available over the same fibre connections, as well as up to 24 nodes on the same network - really adds functionality to large scale systems."
The hire company had been searching for a lightweight and compact 'plug & play' returns system offering reliability, full redundancy and requiring minimal preparation, for some time. Then Chris Hill - along with Wigwam's digital specialist, Alex Hadjigeorgiou - designed and configured the OptoRack in time for the Leona Lewis tour in Spring last year.
Since then, the OptoRacks have provided network control on a number of high profile events, including the UK visit by The Pope - with seven R70 interfaces (the maximum that can be run on one network) operating within a system that included over 2km of fibre cable across over a 2 sq. mile site - and most recently George Michael's Symphonica tour.
"On the Coldplay tour the DD32R-FX units will provide the ability to run 96KHz AES audio via the FOH system EQ in the form of an XTA 548 - right through to the d&b D12 amps, which process AES audio at 96KHz," notes Hadjigeorgiou. "This solution will be equally applicable on smaller tours, such as The Saturdays later this year.
"This truly is a digital system - from the pre-amp on the Digico SD Stagebox right through to the amplifier, with only a single A/D and D/A conversion across the entire system, which will keep latency to the absolute minimum."
(Jim Evans)
