Europe - DirectOut is used by system designer and engineer Ville Kauhanen to provide fail-safe stability for all his complex stadium-touring audio system designs.
Kauhanen has worked non-stop in the industry for nearly 30 years and with some of the highest profile artists on the planet. His recent work includes Taylor Swift’s record-breaking Eras tour, which concluded in December 2024. The tour visited 54 cities across five continents playing 149 shows and was the highest grossing tour of all time.
Kauhanen was the system engineer for the tour and provided the system infrastructure for each location. His method of working today is very different to when he first started, but, as he explains, his huge industry overview enables him to plan for the future, as well as succeed in the present.
“I’m old enough to have seen the transition from analogue to digital. When I started, we had very different ideas of what the future of audio networking would look like,” he says. “We assumed there would just be one huge network with everything in it, but we now know that this may never happen. That’s why I need a strong audio backbone, and that can only be provided by DirectOut. I rely upon the Prodigy range, usually together with EXBOX, for every project I’m involved in.
“I don’t care what the speaker or console brand is, but the audio transportation infrastructure has to be DirectOut-based," he says. “They support so many formats, and their products are flexible and reliable. Due to their popularity and ability to support most audio formats used in productions, I often find that the different vendors for each department can provide Prodigys as part of their package and then I can patch things together as one infrastructure backbone.
“One of the most important parts of my job is planning. I need to get that done early, so the information can be sent to the venues. Because of the impact on seating layout, our loudspeaker, amplifier, console and infrastructure layout all needs to be confirmed before the venues can sell tickets. This is done very far in advance,” he explains. “Once the infrastructure information is in place, we can add anything else we need to; extra audio-feeds or points of connectivity, right up to when the first show starts. We use time-critical NDI video across our network, too, so there are time sensitive issues that need to be understood.”