Both returning after a two-year haiatus inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic, the back-to-back Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival and Stagecoach Festival returned to the Californian desert in style with Camarillo-based Rat Sound Systems as principal audio reinforcement provider.

With its roots going back to 1993 and still held at its original venue, the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, Coachella is now among the world’s largest music festivals. Sstaged over two consecutive weekends, it once again showcased wealth of established and emerging artists. Presented the following weekend in the same location, its sister production Stagecoach Festival is a premier event for folk, mainstream country, bluegrass, roots rock, Americana and alt.country.

As with every Coachella since 2000, Rat Sound provided complete live performance systems across the seven largest performance areas – the Coachella Stage, Outdoor Theatre, Gobi Tent, Sahara Tent, Mojave Tent, Yuma Tent, and the Sonora Tent, respectively handling around 180 acts in each of the two three-day weekends. At Stagecoach, Rat Sound served multiple stages including the Mane, Spotlight, Honkey Tonk, and Palamino Stage. The Mane stage alone included more than 30 delay clusters.

Rat Sound’s Outline Newton processors made their debut at the dual event in 2019, serving as multi-format digital hubs through which the FOH mixes were directed to the multiple main and delay loudspeaker systems across the various stages. In 2022, the Newton stock was deployed in the same way but with additional operational advantages delivered by the latest software and firmware releases. These include enhancements to the functionality of the WFIR filters (by the all-new EQ-CSA algorithm), extended compatibility for the latest Apple Mac computers and, of particular relevance to Coachella, the addition of GPIO port control.

‘Now the Outline team has implemented a GPIO function to the software, and with this we have been able to implement a complete emergency override for every festival stage from a remote, central location,’ says Rat Sound Head of Touring, Jon Monson ‘Over the past few years, it has become increasingly important to offer these kinds of safety enhancements to our festival customers, and the Newton has allowed us to make this happen.

‘The Newtons have become integral to our Coachella – and other festival – systems and workflow,’ he continues. ‘We make use of the Newton’s many formats, including Dante for PA and delay feeds, AES for console I/O, analogue for Emergency Broadcast inputs and analogue PA backup feeds, and Madi for additional local I/O.

‘At Coachella and Stagecoach, we have all the Newtons connected to a central location via fibre. Our set-up allows us to mute any stage’s Newton via the GPIO remotely, and still allows for an emergency announcement to be made. It works so well, we were able to test the system each day when noise curfews were lifted and be done and ready for the morning’s soundchecks within three minutes. It is also easy and reliable enough that we are able to hand off complete control to the festival security team, who did their own testing each day.

‘The software remains one of our favourites to use. We have some basic training videos for new systems engineers – we find an hour of videos on basic operations, routing, how our Emergency System connects and the Smaart integration, gets most up and running with very few questions or need for assistance.’