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Tag: Quantum5

  • Engineers Choose DiGiCo Quantum338 and Quantum5 for Laufey World Tour

    Engineers Choose DiGiCo Quantum338 and Quantum5 for Laufey World Tour

    Laufey is an Icelandic singer-songwriter with a genre-defying style that has won critical acclaim, resulting in a host of awards. The A Matter of Time tour accompanies the album of the same name and began in 2025, concluding in August 2026 with dates globally.  At front of house, Matt Grabe is using a DiGiCo Quantum338, while monitor engineer, Sebastian Mut, began the tour with a Quantum338, but expanded into a Quantum5 for later dates. All consoles are supplied by Sound Image, a Clair Global brand.

    Grabe started engineering and mixing in studios. Twelve years later, a good friend, front-of-house engineer Shane Haase, took him out on tour as system engineer for Alabama Shakes. He worked for a variety of artists over the next seven years, but it was not until another friend asked him to fill in mixing that he took the plunge and returned to a console position. He has been working with Laufey since 2024 and DiGiCo has always been his manufacturer of choice, allowing him to mix fast and instinctively.

    “Having a reliable desk that can be sourced anywhere in the world is non-negotiable,” he explains. “I started specifying Quantum consoles due to the clarity of the screens. I have minimal vision in one eye and a transplant in the other. From day one, my top-tier Sound Image representative Kim Sawaya made sure that one was always available. I didn’t start using Quantum features until recently, but now MSE and Spice Rack are in use on every file.”

    Mut began his training in houses of worship before moving into touring. He started with Laufey in 2024 and has been using DiGiCo consoles throughout his career. He has consistently chosen DiGiCo for the past three years, thanks to the power of the consoles, global availability, and DiGiCo support.

    “We swapped to the Q5 for Laufey’s Coachella performance,” he recalls. “The Q338 and Q5 are fantastic monitor consoles, the layout of both surfaces makes getting anything done very quick and efficient! The most useful features for me have absolutely been the powerful Snapshot and automation functionality, as well as the Spice Rack, specifically Naga 6. With all the international travel on this tour, being able to keep everything in a slim package that can be replicated in a new region quickly has been important for us.”

    Global touring comes with many complications, but for Mut and Grabe, ensuring they have the tools that make their jobs possible is not one of them. Depending on the type of show, the engineers will either take their own equipment or pick it up locally. As Grabe continues, having DiGiCo consoles on the rider means that they are never disappointed by a lack of availability.

    “We travel with the control package, desks, I/O, mics, and instrument DIs,” he continues. “On occasion, we fly into a duplicate of that system. It’s daunting to recreate as we are near fully loaded on four SD-Racks, an SD-MiNi Rack, and over 50 channels of RF. The set has a string quartet, a jazz trio on the B-Stage, and even a moving Steinway grand piano. Our brilliant technicians make that all possible. For solo dates, it’s very simple to convert the show file to whatever SD or Quantum desk is provided locally.”

    Laufey’s style is pure and deliberate, with Grabe using a very light touch in terms of processing. He prefers to rely on the faders to ride dynamics, rather than heavy gating or compression, ensuring every detail is heard with natural clarity. At the monitor position, Mut has a similar methodology, using the Fourier transform.engine as his dedicated choice for plugins, as required. For him, the reliability guaranteed by Fourier’s rock-solid sandboxing gives him an appreciated additional layer of security.

    “The Fourier has been a great piece of hardware; it’s very consistent and has been without any major issues,” he notes. “It’s a relief to know that if anything were to happen with a plugin mid show, it wouldn’t stop everything running on the server. The console integration is a big feature for me. Having Snapshot recall between the transform.engine and the console without any extra hardware or programming is really useful. I’ve also been very impressed with how much processing power I have available to me with just one server.”

    For both engineers, the DiGiCo Quantum ecosystem offers a complete package of reliability, power, and support that means their workflow runs smoothly in any corner of the globe. As they both conclude, on a tour of this scale, that is not a luxury, it is a necessity.

    “We’ve chosen DiGiCo due to logistics, and the power of the desk,” Mut says. “Being able to replicate this package anywhere in the world, quickly, and without much fuss, is a huge selling point for us. And with the powerful Snapshot and automation functionality we can nimbly do anything we’re asked to deliver the best product for our artist.”

    “There are scenarios where you jump on a red-eye flight to mix a new band with nothing but a festival changeover,” Grabe finishes. “Equipped with SD Convert and a punt file, any DiGiCo will do. That doesn’t just make my life easier, it makes the task possible.”

  • Charlie Puth Takes to the Road with Clever DiGiCo Quantum5 Consoles

    Charlie Puth Takes to the Road with Clever DiGiCo Quantum5 Consoles

    Chart-topper and multi-award-winner Charlie Puth’s Whatever’s Clever World Tour is just that; it will take the singer-songwriter-producer on one of his largest live productions to date, with headline dates across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific, starting in April in San Diego and closing (so far) in Perth, Australia in November, in support of his fourth studio album. Onstage, it’s a tight group: besides the artist there are drums, bass, guitars, keyboards, and three backup vocalists. For production manager Mike Schaeffer, who is also mixing front of house, and Josh Cruz at monitors, their instruments are equally important: a pair of DiGiCo Quantum5 consoles, supplied for the tour by Clair Global.

    “The Quantum console has been on the rider for Charlie since 2018,” says Schaeffer. “It’s always been my preferential console. I’ve always chosen DiGiCo, and so the console became a requirement based on anything we were doing.”

    Both consoles are on a single Optocore network, sharing it with an SD-Rack and an SD-MiNi Rack, as well as an Orange Box bidirectional audio-format converter that connects between any two of the compatible DiGiCo Multichannel Interface (DMI) cards. In this case, some of the outboard used on the tour includes various Waves plug-ins, as well as a Rupert Neve Designs Shelford channel strip that combines transformer-gain microphone preamp, an inductor-based equalizer (EQ), and a diode-bridge compressor that Schaeffer applies to Puth’s vocals. Otherwise, the Quantum5 desks are pretty much the center of all routing as well as processing.

    “The Quantum5 is a very comfortable desk to move around on,” he says. “My workflow is pretty straightforward. I do a lot of bus processing. I like the fact that you can send a bus to a bus, which a lot of consoles just didn’t do for a while. I use a Rupert Neve Design master-bus processor and a master-bus transformer. No matter what configuration of outboard and onboard processing I need, the Quantum5 lets me organize it however it best suits my workflow needs.”

    Josh Cruz joined Puth crew in 2022, as the band was just formulating itself around the core that would be on the current tour. “DiGiCo has also been my preference for a while. I’m doing a lot more than just your basic channel input to aux output,” he explains. “So having the flexibility of the three banks of faders, a powerful macro section, and the amount of inputs and outputs the Q5 offers were super helpful.”

    Cruz describes his goal when monitor mixing as preserving the feel for the musician. “I tend to take a very basic approach to monitor mixing: a lot of my EQs are pretty flat, not a ton of compression going on. The band members are very particular about their sounds and it’s not my place to unnecessarily manipulate any of that. For example, our guitar player uses an Axe-FX and he shapes a lot of his sounds on the front end. He literally says, ‘Do not put any filtering, EQ, or compression on it.’ It’s an XLR straight to the desk and I simply send it right back to him at the level he wants.”

    “We’re a little over the 56 I/O an SD-Rack offers in terms of physical inputs coming from the stage, but in total terms of what’s on my desk, I’m almost maxed out: there are a few double-patched inputs, effects returns, and there’s a number of playback channels, which come in over MADI through the Orange Box. We also have the Sound Devices Astral wireless ARX16, running two of them in mirror mode, and that provides all of our vocal inputs. Plus, I have a number of utility channels that I’m using to allow for some tech control. It expands well beyond the normal use case of an input channel being something coming from stage.”

    Fortunately, the Quantum5 is more than up to the task, designed, as Cruz puts it, “to remove the guardrails around what it means when you look at an input channel, an aux, a group, or a matrix,” he says. “I can essentially take any of those things and turn them into anything that I want and route them anywhere. And because of that, it has allowed me to push the limits as to what each of those things can do.”

    Another capability both engineers celebrate about DiGiCo’s Quantum technology is its ability to manage control from numerous sources via massive I/O capacity, Optocore fiber loops, DMI cards (Dante, MADI, Waves), and extensive software integration. “One thing that I really appreciate is that the DiGiCo consoles have the ability to have external control from a number of different sources,” says Cruz. “Being able to incorporate the console into a network is pretty common in a lot of consoles these days, but with the Quantum5, specifically, I’m able to control it from multiple sources at monitors.” He cites the software Companion by Bitfocus using a custom module called DiGiPanion by fellow DiGiCo user David Lim, which allows operators to manage tasks such as triggering complex macros and interfacing with external platforms such as DAW systems, with a single button press. “The flexibility of what DiGiCo has made available through their OSC control has been super helpful for me,” he says. “Capabilities like that, and the ability to let us work the way we want to, is why DiGiCo is always the top choice.”