Stretching Out

Antony King comes off as affable and animated, a condition that perhaps, he posits, is a result of moving his home base of operations from his native and rainy UK to sunnier Los Angeles. A tour visionary of sorts who can readily describe a future in detail where trucks drive and load themselves, the PA is flown by drones, and gear is ordered online from the sound reinforcement division of Amazon, he grounds himself in the here-and-now at FOH with his pair of SSL L500 consoles running in Expander mode.

Basically “stretched” like a limousine to operate as a single console, the twin desks afford King with the ability to place a greater number of faders under his command as well as an opportunity to let crew chief Hulkes jump into the act on the second surface, where he can re-patch things in real-time, manage broadcast feeds, and do any one of a number of things to bring better efficiency to the show, all while freeing King to bring more focus to his mix.

The SSL L500s are fed by SSL ML 32.32 stage boxes using a redundant, MADI-based optical connection. To keep things simple, bulletproof, and to avoid the prospect of having to employ an analog split, Sarne Thorogood’s Midas PRO X (which works in conjunction with four Midas DL 431 stage boxes providing 96 available analog inputs) captures its signals from the analog mic amp splits found on the SSL stage boxes.

In the quest to keep his main mix clear and coherent, King leans heavily on his input channels, VCAs, and SSL Stem Groups, using the latter both as aux buses with their own independent processing paths, and as sub-mixed sets of around 16 stems for video and broadcast feeds.

“With these live SSL boards,” King states, “there really are no limits. The consoles will do anything I want them to. With other desks you get fixed numbers of channels and auxes. There’s none of that here. If anything, initially I felt limited by having no limitations. I had to re-think and adjust accordingly to all this freedom.”

Processing found within the SSLs looms large, with internal reverb being used freely along with the onboard bus compressors, Enhancer, and VHD Saturator. Gating and dynamics falls within the jurisdiction of SSL’s standard live channel processing, and with two insert points, King can run his outboard gear on one and his internal FX on the other.

When it comes to outboard racks, he’s locked and loaded with many old favorites, led by a pair of big, four-engine TC Electronic 6000s he applies to a wide cross section of vocals. An ardent believer in the notion that there’s no substitute for a Yamaha REV 7 for drum sounds, he asserts that “no one has ever made a plugin to replicate it properly yet.”

TC’s D-Two is also at hand for vocals, along with a Manley VOXBOX used expressly for Gahan’s vocals, and a Warm Audio WA76 on Gore’s. He calls upon a GML 8900 from George Massenburg Labs for master left-right compression.

Sonic Presence

The process of gathering input onstage is a task dominated by beyerdynamic from stem to stern without exception. Starting with six channels of TG 1000 wireless transmitters topped with V70 capsules used for vocals, the theme continues with hardwired versions of the same mic popping up at multiple keyboard stations.

In-ear monitoring systems are the norm onstage – with the exception of an abstaining Andy Fletcher ¬– and 10 channels of Sennheiser 2050 transmission are the order of the day along with 20 receivers, all of it supported by a pair of Sennheiser AC 3200 antenna combiners and a pair of helical antenna systems. Ear buds are universally UE18+ Pro models from Ultimate Ears.

“The wireless systems are super-robust,” reports Thorogood, who’s originally from New Zealand. “They have an extremely large frequency range, so you never find yourself in a position of being forced to ‘fit in’ somewhere you don’t want to be or shouldn’t be. With the onboard scanning offered, if you run into interference you simply scoot around the trouble and move on.”

Adding the benefit of old-fashioned sonic presence (plus a place for IEM holdout Fletcher to listen in), stereo d&b audiotechnik M2 mixes span across the three keyboard positions. Four double-M2 mixes are also deployed along the stage edge, while a pair of ground-stacked SB28s from L-Acoustics stand on each side.

Q-SUBs from d&b can be found at the drum riser, and as a final complement, another M2 mix lies just offstage, used as needed for musical direction. Backline techs are all on IEMs with their own mix.

Extending The Excitement

“The term ‘legacy’ is often bandied about too casually when speaking of bands like this,” King notes while taking a moment to reflect during Depeche Mode’s historic four-night run at the Hollywood Bowl in October. “But on this tour it truly has depth and meaning, especially in a sonic sense.

“There’s a need for us to be true to what they’ve created over the last four decades in the studio,” he continues. “Conversely, it’s equally important that we extend the live excitement to the crowd uniformly in these large spaces.

“It’s a delicate balance, then, preserving that studio integrity that fans expect, all while firing up the crowd with a live energy that includes huge drums the likes of which you’ll never find in a studio. To pull it off each night is a challenge, but fortunately we have the skills, talent, and gear to make it recognizable on all levels. This is one helluva crew.”