Kicking off in San José, Costa Rica in 2022 and taking a hiatus following a ten-date residency at London’s Wembley Stadium to concluded in September 2025, Coldplay’s 225-show Music of the Spheres World Tour has visited in 80 cities across 43 countries to date. The tour took advantage of its Australian leg to bring DiGiCo’s Quantum852 onboard.
Supporting 2021’s Music of the Spheres and 2024’s Moon Music albums, the stadium run is also significant for its sustainability initiatives, reducing CO2 emissions by nearly 60 per cent compared to the band’s previous outing. Far from over, the run is expected to pick up again in 2027 on what the band have teased as ‘138 more shows to go’.
If the tour’s longevity is impressive, it pales in comparison to the tenures of some of its key crew, including Coldplay FOH engineer and audio producer since 1998 Dan Green, and Tony Smith, head of audio system design and FOH tech, who has worked with Green for 23 of those years. Almost as remarkable, the lion’s share of that has found the duo working with DiGiCo worksurfaces.
‘I’ve been using DiGiCo since 2011, starting on the SD7, and have carried on ever since,’ says Green, who eventually bumped up his worksurface to a Quantum7 with a new Quantum engine. ‘DiGiCo is just so versatile – it has so many ins and outs, and its matrixing is amazing. It’s just very versatile.’
In November 2024 in Australia, Green and Smith had the opportunity to switch the FOH mix over to a new Solotech-supplied Quantum852, and jumped at the chance. ‘The Q8 has been amazing – it just offers so much more workflow flexibility,’ Green says. ‘It’s taken everything that was great about the Quantum7 and expanded upon that. The screens are amazing, obviously, and it enables me to have more layers and a lot more workspace on the desk. The Q8 is clearly the best of the DiGiCo bunch, so far.’
Green notes that he particularly appreciates the Quantum852’s onboard processing. ‘The expanded Spice Rack has allowed me to free up some of my plug in chains, which I was using on outboard processors, and be more integrated into the console, which is really useful to have everything under my fingertips. The onboard filters are always the first thing that I go to for any channel that’s coming into the desk. I use them to do the immediate cleanup of the low end if it’s needed – or if the top end needs to be cleaned up – and the Q8’s filters work really well. I really like their sound. They’ve got a nice analogue feel to them.’
With the band performing on no fewer than three stages at each stop, a huge number of inputs are coming into the FOH console. ‘I think it’s around about 200 or so, plus another 32 channels of ambient microphones as we’re recording every show,’ Green says. ‘The Q8 is amazing because, as far as I know, it’s the only desk on the market that would be able to handle that amount of inputs.’
The Quantum852 has been able to provide ‘exceptional’ feeds for broadcasters: ‘Our recordings have far too many channels to be able to send out to a broadcast engineer; there’s no way they’d be able to accept those channels, let alone mix them in a live situation,’ Green says. ‘The Quantum8 has so many auxes that I’m able to create submixes of all of my individual elements and send out 48 channels of stems to the broadcasters so that they’ve got a head start. In fact, they can line up their faders at zero, and that’s a good starting point. They can recreate my mix and then adjust it to be tailored for whatever they’re mixing for.’
‘We’re really proud of what we’ve achieved with the sonics of the Coldplay shows, and we always get nice comments back about the shows. Wherever you are in the venue, it’s a great experience. And it’s also great because the social feeds and broadcasts sound brilliant because of our stem system. We’ve had an incredible response to our Glastonbury performance from the BBC, so we are really pleased with how everything is sounding.’
The tour’s commitment to ‘going green’ is embraced by all departments, including audio. ‘Sustainability has been a big part of what we’re trying to achieve for the tour,’ Green says. ‘In the audio department, we’ve tried to downscale our racks, whereas before I had a lot of analogue hardware, lots of analogue preamps, lots of outboard. And I’m really happy that now we’ve managed to reduce our set-up down to the Quantum8 and basically one rack by the use of Fourier plug-ins and onboard effects and processing on the desk. It’s made a big difference.’
Green and Smith actually started out with the beta version of Fourier Audio’s transform.engine two-and-a-half years ago, before it was officially launched, and were able to road test it by slowly integrating it into their setup. ‘Fourier was really interesting to me as I was able to host the VST3 plug-ins that I use a lot in the studio, and I wanted to have the opportunity to bring these into a live context,’ Green says. ‘I was really excited to beta test it. And as soon as we got the full working version – the official release – we put it into our system and it’s been fantastic. I’ve uploaded all of my effects onto the Fourier and have really enjoyed exploring VST3 plug-ins in a way that I wasn’t able to do before.’
‘With mixing live audio, I’ve always enjoyed using plug-ins because it enables me to switch things out and try different things on an almost nightly basis, if I want,’ he continues. ‘Hardware is amazing and I love it, but it’s quite restricting in the fact that once you’ve built a rack, you’re normally stuck with that rack for the duration of the tour or the whole campaign – in our case, that’s four years! So it’s quite hard to change things in and out on an ad hoc basis when it’s all still working. With the transform.engine, having access to all of these VST3 plug-ins enables me to experiment with any idea that I may have. Anything that pops to mind, I can basically just give it a try – let alone also being able to stack processes, which in hardware is much harder. For instance, I may have a reverb that I want to follow by a compressor. If I want to try that, I’ve got the option to be able to do that.’
‘The Fourier has been really rock-solid – no complaints there at all – and it’s been a joy to test it on DiGiCo products. I’m really excited about what they’ve got to offer in the future.’
Smith’s appreciations of the Quantum852 stems from a very practical standpoint when it comes to outdoor show environments. ‘Everywhere seems to be hotter these days, and in some places on the tour the temperature at front of house has reached 43° [110°F], so that presents its share of challenges for the consoles, racks, and everything else,’ he says. ‘But clearly a lot of thought has been given to how air and heat flow through the Quantum8. It runs so much cooler, which is amazing, because there’s more processing power under the hood. Knowing that shows will stay up-and-running even in the hottest conditions, for me, that’s a huge relief.’
Under the stage, in monitor world, Chris ‘Woodsy’ Wood continues to ride the faders of his tried-and-trusted Quantum7, says Smith. ‘Though he was tempted to move over to the Q8 when we did, Chris is more than happy with the Q7, so why change if it’s not broken? And aside from a Bricasti M7, there’s no outboard being used on monitors. The Q7’s Nodals get used, as well as all the Spice Rack and onboard effects – it’s all onboard.’
Great gear is only as good as its support, and the support from DiGiCo has reportedly been sterling. ‘DiGiCo have just been amazing to us,’ says Green. ‘They’ve been so supportive and the team are always there to answer a text or help us with any emergency situation. And if we have any ideas on how to do things, or any strange requests, Dave and the team are always there to help us and answer our messages whenever we send them.’
‘From my point of view, not being the mixer, one of my favourite things about DiGiCo is the amazing support, which you always need,’ Smith agrees. ‘When you’re halfway around the world, things do go wrong. But if you’ve got the right support, you know you can get through it. And in the past, DiGiCo has pulled rabbits out of hats.’
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