Avid VENUE Profile Powers Abbey Road Live Here Now

Abbey Road Live Here Now team debuted VENUE Profile during Faithless’ recent world tour and the system was also used on Eliza Doolittle’s Manchester and London concerts, which were held last month. For these selected tours the team work with location recording company DMZ Live, who provide the vehicles and equipment for remote recording.

The recordings give fans a unique opportunity to own a souvenir from their concert and can be purchased straight after the concert has finished or downloaded from the artist’s website afterwards.

When recording a live feed there can clearly be no room for error, as MJ, head of live at Abbey Road Live Here Now, explains: “We really do only have one shot at recording live concerts. You can’t ask Faithless to repeat their last track because the feed broke up! So we needed a system that was 100% reliable and produced brilliant sound. Sound quality is paramount when you’re selling a high-end product to fans.”

He adds: “The nature of our work also takes us around the world so we needed the desk to be portable - the VENUE Profile system fulfilled all these requirements and more.”

During recording, the MADI feed passes through an optical cable into the MADI Option card, which is inserted into the VENUE desk. It’s then mixed in stereo and mastered on the desk, before being passed to real-time burners to create the master CDs. The turnaround time for CDs is a mere five minutes after the band’s encore has finished.

Avid reseller HD Pro Audio brokered the deal and Avid’s James Baker, UK Live Sound Specialist, was on hand to offer support and advice to DMZ Live and the Abbey Road Live Here Now throughout the process. “Avid’s customer service team was excellent - a week after purchasing the desk we were up and running,” concludes MJ.