Under the hood
Consoles, protocols,
and the plumbing between them.
The gear I actually run, and the parts of it that matter when something needs to keep working under pressure.
DiGiCo
SD5, SD-Mini and Quantum 326 — these are the desks I mix and system-engineer on week to week, FOH and monitor world both.
Optocore redundancy is the part worth understanding properly rather than trusting blindly: in a mirrored-engine system, both engines' MADI outputs are always live and identical — nothing switches on the engine side. It's the rack that decides which one it's listening to, using a set of internal priorities and a signalling channel carried inside the MADI stream. That's what gives broken-cable and dead-engine redundancy without a MIDI message or an operator having to do anything.
Clocking follows the same distributed logic — the lowest-numbered ID on the Optocore loop runs the master clock, and the system hands off automatically to the next lowest ID if that device drops off the network. Useful in practice: you can clock from a stage rack instead of FOH, which matters when an OB truck is sat right next to the stage.
MADI carries 56 channels of audio plus a control channel for the racks — and at 96kHz there are two incompatible ways of packing that data (SMUX and the confusingly-named Hi-Speed, which isn't actually faster, just ordered differently). Getting that wrong when feeding a third-party recorder is a classic way to end up with audio landing on the wrong channels — so it's one of the first things I check when patching in outside record gear.
- SD5 · SD-Mini · Quantum 326
- Optocore redundancy
- MADI · SMUX vs Hi-Speed
The rest of the rig
Every desk has its place.
Optocore
A dual-fibre redundant ring, used across DiGiCo and increasingly bridged into other systems via R-series I/O. The bit that actually matters on a show day: it's the rack that decides which path is live, not the desk — so a cut fibre or a dead engine can fail over on its own, with nobody touching a fader. Clocking follows the same logic: the lowest-numbered device on the loop runs the master clock, and it hands off automatically if that device drops.
- Redundant ring
- Rack-led failover
- Distributed clocking
DirectOut
PRODIGY.MP would be my choice for a drive rack — DSP, RAVENNA/AES67 and Dante networking side by side (RAV.IO / DANTE.IO), GPIO and clocking all in one box. Build it into a proper showfile rather than patching it together on the day, and it's the same box behaving the same way, show after show.
- PRODIGY.MP
- RAV.IO / DANTE.IO
- Showfile builds
Allen & Heath
dLive and SQ cover far more than monitor world — dense scenes, fast recalls, and a sound that holds up at the top end too. It's Nick Warren's desk of choice on Paul Weller, and it's easy to hear why — it sounds awesome.
- dLive
- SQ
- FOH-proven
Yamaha
Still turn up on plenty of corporate rooms and house systems — dependable digital consoles worth being genuinely fluent on, not just tolerating for the day.
- Digital consoles
- Corporate & house systems
Fourier
Dante-native audio distribution and processing for corporate and broadcast-adjacent rigs — flexible routing across a network rather than a fixed analogue snake. The feature that's genuinely useful on a festival day: it can hold multiple plugin licence keys at once, so several engineers on different consoles can each run their own authorised processing from the same shared hardware — no dongle-swapping between changeovers.
- Dante-native
- Multi-key licensing
- Festival changeovers
Waves
SoundGrid processing, brought into the signal chain where a desk supports it. It's still everywhere on tour riders and stageplots — plenty of engineers swear by it, even if the plugin set itself is starting to show its age.
- SoundGrid
- Industry standard
UAD
Universal Audio's DSP-accelerated plugin world — genuinely one of my favourites. The Apollo's DSP and the tonality it brings is a big part of my home studio, and there's a warmth to it that's hard to get elsewhere.
- UAD-2 / Apollo
- Home studio