The boutique What The Festival (WTF) returned to the Wolf Run Ranch in Oregon with Funktion-One sound reinforcement systems – including a Vero system for the main stage – deployed across the festival by Sound Investment and Fusebox Productions.

WTF first played in 2012, the same year that the festival’s co-founder, Glen Boyd, had Sound Investment install a Funktion-One sound system in his house. This year’s event welcomed 7,500 people, who came for what Boyd describes as ‘a totally immersive’ festival.

Zurich’s famed Moods jazz club has a new streaming platform for its concerts – called moods.digital, it will carry both live streaming and video on demand, with 20 concerts in Sennheiser’s Ambeo 3D. It is the world’s first streaming platform to offer concerts in Ambeo 3D audio.

The new Digital Concert Club has already gained a good level of popularity and, with Ambeo, Moods co-director Claudio Cappellari promises listeners ‘an immersive listening experience beyond compare’ with the support of Sennheiser co-CEOs Daniel and Andreas Sennheiser.

Performing arenas and amphitheatres across North America, country music star Dierks Bentley is using the first digitally linked Meyer Sound Leo Family sound system with a Galileo Galaxy platform and AVB/TSN Ethernet networking.

‘I wanted to have more flexibility and distribution options to the stage,’ says James ‘Pugsley’ McDermott, who doubles as FOH mixer and systems engineer. ‘With our old set-up we didn’t have a one-box, one protocol solution. With Galaxy and AVB, I have all my digital signals on a single fibre-optic line and four channels of analogue backup. But the real selling point for Galaxy was the move up to the 96kHz sampling and high bit-depth processing. The difference in sonic quality and dynamic range is huge.’

Performing the final six studio albums from The Beatles catalogue using the same instruments, amplifiers and arrangements – complete with live strings and horns – Dutch band The Analogues have tracked down and restored period instruments from all over the world. To date, the band have conquered Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour, and will tour The White Album from January 2018.

FOH engineer Remko Luijten has been working with The Analogues for two years, with monitor engineer Ger Arts recently joining the tour. The extreme demands of the project have drawn both to SSL Live L500 consoles, supplied by the Dutch rental company, Peak Audio.

The scope and scale of the production of Verdi’s Rigoletto on Europe’s largest natural stage demanded audio design of similar scope – and faced challenges of similar scale.

The open-air performance at Austria’s St Margarethen Quarry prompted sound designer Volker Werner to adopt Out Board’s TiMax SoundHub spatial audio processing to address both issues.