Undisputedly one of the most popular and critically acclaimed “indie’ artists of the
moment, Florence + the Machine has enjoyed a phenomenal year with numerous
highlights including her new album “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful’ topping the
charts in the UK and US and a show-stopping headline set on Glastonbury’s Pyramid
Stage.

Adlib provided a large and innovatively designed “racks-and-stacks’ audio package
for the recent UK leg of the current world tour. Adlib has a long history with New
York based Firehouse Productions, providing stacks and racks in UK and Europe on
world tours supported by them. One such tour was Radiohead in 2012 with FOH
engineer Jim Warren who now works with Florence. Narci Martinez (RHCP and Josh
Groban production manager) is at the helm, pulling this fantastic production
together, as the tour’s production manager.

Marc Olivier Germain is the systems engineer for the world tour and in collaboration
with Warren, took the opportunity of implementing some new, interesting and
different ideas to optimise Florence’s very unique sound.

Adlib’s crew was headed up by senior systems engineer Tony Szabo KSE, with Sam
Proctor as second PA Technician and James Petch as stage technician. Szabo and
the Adlib team worked closely with Germain to ensure that all Warren’s
requirements were met. At the stage end of the arena we find Ross Anderson
supporting and coordinating all things stage audio and RF for monitor engineer Jon
Ormisher.

A substantial L-Acoustics system was provided by Adlib, with the main PA hangs
comprising 12 x K1 speakers per side each with 6 x K2 downs … a combination
adopted after Warren and Germain had good results with this format over the
summer festival season and wanted to try it in arenas.

Another slightly unorthodox approach was in flying three 8 deep arrays of K1-SB
subs – one either side of the main hangs, plus a centre cluster to even out the sub
coverage.

Their standard side hangs were 12 of the versatile L-Acoustics K2s per side.

On the ground, the SB28 subs were arranged in an end-fire format comprising a
row of two high and three wide with an identical row directly behind and all set up
with critical spacing.

A special formula involving time alignment and phasing made this sub layout
extremely directional and functioning far more efficiently than a cardiod system,
dramatically reducing the sub frequencies behind the array.

For front fills, they used a selection of ARC2 and KARA enclosures and LA8
amplifiers drove the entire system.

Germain tours his own spec Firehouse control rack, so Adlib modified their Lake
Dante Fibre system to incorporate Focurite D16R RedNet Dante interfaces at FOH to
take AES from the control rack to stage using Dante where it was distributed as AES
in to the LA8 amplifiers all running at 96k.

The tour goes to the U.S. and Australia before returning to Europe for the end of the
year.