Lake provides “unmatched sound quality” at ULTRA Music Festival

Audio for the ULTRA Music Festival in Miami, one of the biggest festivals in the world, ran on a backbone of Lake Processing this year.

Beach Sound, a full service concert production company that handles festivals, concerts and corporate events of all sizes, was responsible for the sound set-up.

“We go back to the original Lake processors,” said Neil Rosenstock, head of audio at Beach Sound, “and we have owned a number of Lab.gruppen amplifiers in the past, including several FP 6400 units, so when Lake moved over to become part of Lab.gruppen, we were confident it would retain all the qualities that made it famous, and then some. We had tried out the LM 44 on our last festival, and just loved the EQ and routing capabilities. The converter is the best and the sound quality is unmatched.”

Now a D&B and L-Acoustics house, Beach Sound were confident that the use of Lake technology would provide the flexibility and feature set required for a gig this size.

“We used four LM 44s – three at front of house and one for monitors," added Rosenstock. "At FOH we were using both analogue ins and outs, as well as AES ins and outs. The flexibility of the LM 44s meant we could have a combination of Dante and AES routing between the units.

“We use Lake products on all of our front end EQ. It definitely adds a comfort factor to guest engineers, as they can just grab the tablet and walk around, change levels and EQ at the zone that they are working on without being tied behind the console.”

ULTRA won Best Music Event at the International Dance Music Awards (IDMA) over six consecutive years, from 2005 to 2011; Best International Dance Music Festival at the Ibiza DJ Awards in 2008 and was named Best Festival by the Village Voice Media New Times consecutively from 2005 to 2009.

Originally created as a pure EDM (electronic dance music) festival in 1999, ULTRA has grown over the years to present not only the genre’s headline acts (The Prodigy, Swedish House Mafia, The Chemical Brothers, Tiësto, David Guetta, deadmau5, Underworld, Kraftwerk, Armin van Buuren, to name a few), but also crossover headline bands like The Cure, The Killers, New Order, Duran Duran, The Black Eyed Peas, Erasure, M83, and even Madonna, who performed in 2012.

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