MILO earns its White Stripes

20 October 2005

World - The White Stripes tour has seen the minimalist rock duo delivering performances to sold-out crowds on several continents. Six years and five albums into their careers, the duo of Jack and Meg White show no signs of slowing down.

Detroit-based Thunder Audio has been providing the sound for much of this year's foray, based around an array of 24 Meyer Sound MILO high-power curvilinear array loudspeakers. FOH engineer Matthew Kettle, mixing the band on a Midas Heritage 3000 console, favours a stripped-down approach that calls for little in the way of effects, other than a bit of compression and a slight touch of reverb. Two LD-3 compensating line drivers provide system drive processing, while status of the loudspeakers are monitored from a laptop computer running RMS remote monitoring system software.

"The MILO rigs, in particular, have proved to be quite versatile," reports Thunder Audio VP Paul Owen. "People typically associate Meyer gear with more mainstream, acoustic or jazz-oriented material, but we've found the MILOs to be exceptional for a much wider range of sounds. We've had great results using the MILO on the Garbage tour, and are sending one of our rigs out with Slipknot as well."

Stage mics are a combination of Sennheiser Evolution series and Neumann KM184s. The shows are being recorded to an iZ Technology Radar 24 recorder, with Kettle using a pair of Meyer Sound HD-1 high definition audio monitors to mix the recordings backstage.

(Jim Evans)