was Dobson Sound, which along with the above also supplied equipment including an Avid VENUE console – stock-full of Waves plug-ins and a long- term favourite of Gräfe – for FOH and a Yamaha DM1000 for monitors. Outboard was limited in an heroically tidy FOH space, but Gräfe did get some mileage out of a dbx 120XP subharmonic synthesizer. The audio transportation workflow saw a MADI stream from the console being converted via an RME PCI card to AES/EBU and then delivered to 40 d&b D12 amplifiers.
IPC processor... might this be the kind of thing they were looking for, he wondered? It was. Within weeks, Zuleeg, band and crew were working on a system design for Kraftwerk that paired an entirely d&b-based speaker spec with Iosono. Hitherto primarily encountered in theatre or museum environments, Iosono 3D configurations are based around the spatial audio processor IPC 100 and allow sounds to be mapped and moved freely in a three-dimensional space. Although the huge potential of this
new configuration was obvious from the get-go, there was a determination “to not overload the audience. It had to be a subtle, spatial approach”, says Zuleeg, who worked closely with Felix Einsiedel, a freelancer for d&b, on the project. In the London system design – which
closely mirrors that of the Dusseldorf shows – a total of 30 d&b sound sources were linked up to the Iosono system. Two of these sources comprised the front left and right hangs of seven deep V-Series arrays comprising five V8 and two V12 loudspeakers. The next four constituted a quartet of T10s, spaced equally across the stage, while the remaining 24 – positioned around the audience area – were made up of Q10s. Rounding out the core spec were eight V-SUBs and four J-INFRAs for bass reinforcement. Alongside the system set- up Blank provided a set and stage design that reduced the reverberation time of the basic room from 10 seconds to about 2.5 seconds by using large, strong drapes with a wall distance of 30cm to 80cm. Audio supplier for the London shows
FOH engineer Serge Gräfe “Delivering the audio for these shows
is a properly collaborative effort,” says Gräfe, who began working as a live tech for Kraftwerk in 2005, four years before stepping up to the FOH plate. “The band wants to be involved in every aspect and treats you like a colleague; there is no differentiation. Now, with the Iosono set- up, we have a lot of scope for creativity with the sound, which is very exciting.” The latter includes putting the musicians in the unique position of moving their own sound sources around the system. A few hours later, as a diamond hard
yet dynamic rendition of The Robots opened up two hours of gleaming electronica, it’s not easy to shake the suspicion that Kraftwerk have already realised a perfect vision of immersive sound. True to the aforementioned intentions, the 3D audio is generally discreet, only becoming more all- engulfing on setpiece songs such as Radio-activity, now rendered more affecting than ever due to a recent makeover that references the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Of course, given the band’s penchant
for boundary-pushing, it might well be a tad premature to declare of the new production ‘job done’. As Gräfe remarks, “who knows where we might go with this technology in the future?”n www.dbaudio.comwww.iosono-sound.com