Canadian front of house engineer Matt Blakely is the happy owner of PRODIGY.MP for his personal live audio processing. Blakely has over 20 years’ experience and his latest tour with Billy Talent had dates worldwide, throughout the summer.
A chance encounter initially made him think about his audio interfacing and after trying PRODIGY.MP, he says he will never go back. It is not just the hardware that withstands the demands of a worldwide tour, the relationship and support he gets from DirectOut means other solutions cannot compete.
“It all started when my preferred interface became unsupported,” Blakely recalls. “I can’t remember who suggested I tried the PRODIGY.MP, but I gave it a go for driving the PA. It is a great, simple solution for festivals, but even more useful when we’re touring our own PA as we can have full control of our mix with the 16 by 16 matrix.”
The PRODIGY.MP proved to be a singularly robust solution that would serve all the band’s interfacing needs. But was much more capable than Blakely first realised, and a training session in Toronto showed him just how much it could do. One of the features that he now uses most often is the intuitive sample rate conversions for upscaling sample rates between devices.
“We benefitted from training with Luca Giaroli at the Canadian distributors for DirectOut. The workflow was so simple and it just made sense,” he says. “When we’re working with broadcast, we can send the signal digitally from the console, through the PRODIGY.MP, which will clock it and figure out the rest, seamlessly upscaling or downgrading sample rates as needed.”
Blakely soon realised the PRODIGY.MP could replace several separate devices, streamlining his touring set-up and giving him piece of mind in any situation with its multilevel redundancy concept. The PRODIGY.MP benefits from dual power supplies, input managers and EARS (Enhanced Automatic Redundancy Switching). Thanks to the addition of his RAVENNA module, Blakely also utilises uninterrupted backup streams.
Matt Blakely“It really is a powerful piece of equipment and it’s important to have those backups. The PRODIGY.MP does everything I need seamlessly. It drives the PA, interfaces between analogue and digital kit, runs backups, and all within a 2U box. It's been great since the day I started using it, which is going on for three years. It's been rock solid the whole time. It's great piece of kit.”
The capacity, control and flexibility that comes with using DirectOut equipment means that, in any application, the PRODIGY.MP can improve the situation.
“It really makes a difference, and you can hear it in the digital paths instantly,” Blakely continues. “A really cool example of this happened when we were at a club and I was using my SSL console, clocking at 96K, but the in-house console was older and was on 48k. We sent digital audio from the older console and played it through the system. The signal path now took it through the PRODIGY.MP, which clocked and sampled it up. The in-house guy, who had been mixing in this venue forever, heard it and couldn't understand why his console suddenly sounded better!”
With such impressive features, Blakely is noticing that more engineers are following his lead and choosing DirectOut, as he concludes.
“I think it’s fair to say that my PRODIGY.MP was the first one to be used in Canada,” he says. “Now I’m seeing them in use by many more engineers, either in an OB truck for broadcast, or in the back of some really high-profile consoles. The FIR and IIR filtering sounds great. I think that’s why they’re popping up more and more!”
