Avicii retires in Dubai with d&b.
In a night filled with lights, loud music and lasers, retiring Swedish electronic artist and DJ, Avicii, played his last ever show in Dubai to nearly ten thousand fans at the city's World Trade Centre. With the technical support of eclipse Staging Services, the venue was pushed to its limits for a farewell - stadium worthy - production.
The audio department at eclipse was more than ready to take on the responsibility, delivering clear, uninterrupted sound to listeners in the huge Sheikh Rashid Hall, a configurable room comprising various areas including seven VIP platforms. Led by John Parkhouse it was a chance for the team to put their new d&b DS10 Audio network bridges to work, as Parkhouse explains: "We made significant use of our new DS10s which allowed us to transfer PA feeds and R1 system control via our Lake LM44s to the DS10s and amplifiers via Dante with a primary and redundant backup over Cat5. We used S/PDIF to AES3 converters on the DJ mixer which meant that the signal stayed in the digital domain from source through front of house and to the amplifiers. This resulted in a significant and notable quality to the sound."
The main system deployed for the job combined J and V-Series: twenty eight Js and sixteen Vs, all of which got the full benefit of the d&b line array optimization software ArrayProcessing. Sixteen J-SUBs and six J-INFRAs took care of the all important low end. "Our d&b systems never cease to amaze us in their depth of quality with every nuance crystal clear throughout the entire frequency range and the spatial stereo field being vast. The J-INFRAs, in particular, were notable in giving the tangible feel of energy in the air and at various VIP platforms. With a full capacity audience in such a large hall, the sound really was absolutely incredible."
"From a technical perspective, the Avicii tour walked into a show ready rig the evening they arrived," concluded Duncan Shortt, Project Manager for eclipse, "That they spent less than three hours updating lighting positions, tweaking the PA to their specific needs, and finalising the pixel maps to suit their content output is a great indicator of how comfortable they felt with the setup."
