Taking the Best Music Event at the International Dance Music Awards (IDMA) for six consecutive years, Best International Dance Music Festival at the Ibiza DJ Awards in 2008 and Best Festival from the Village Voice Media New Times five years running, Miami’s Ultra Music Festival reckons to be the world’s most famous outdoor electronic dance event.

Originally a pure EDM (electronic dance music) event in 1999, Ultra now hosts headline artists such as The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, Kraftwerk and Fatboy Slim. And it has expanded to include crossover bands like The Cure, The Killers, New Order and Madonna, who performed in 2012.

This year, Beach Sound – a Miami concert production company that handles festivals, concerts and corporate events of all shapes and sizes – ran the event on a backbone of Lake Processing. ‘We go back to the original Lake processors, and we have owned a number of Lab.gruppen amplifiers in the past, including several FP 6400 units’ says Neil Rosenstock, Head of Audio at Beach Sound. ‘So when Lake moved over to become part of Lab.gruppen, we were confident it would retain all the qualities that made it famous – and then some. We had tried out the LM 44 on our last festival, and just loved the EQ and routing capabilities. The converter is the best and the sound quality is unmatched.’

Now a d&b audiotechnik and L-Acoustics house, Beach Sound was confident that a backbone of Lake for Ultra would provide the flexibility and feature set required for a gig this size: ‘We used four LM 44s, three at FOH and one for monitors,’ Rosenstock explains. ‘At FOH we were using both analogue ins and outs, as well as AES ins and outs. The flexibility of the LM 44s meant we could have a combination of Dante and AES routing between the units.’

With Lake Processing now an industry standard, events the size of Ultra Music Festival have been made easier for the audio team behind it, with visiting engineers expecting to see the familiar interface of the Lake Controller when they step behind the desk: ‘We use Lake products on all of our front end EQ,’ Rosenstock says. ‘It definitely adds a comfort factor to guest engineers, as they can just grab the tablet and walk around, change levels and EQ at the zone that they are working on without being tied behind the console. That kind of familiarity is invaluable, especially for an event the size and scale of Ultra Music Festival.’