Throughout After Hours Til Dawn, The Weeknd’s record-breaking stadium tour, the four-time Grammy Award-winning artist has performed to the largest audiences of his career, supported by a production team matching the scale and ambition of the show. With sophisticated sound and visual systems underpinning each performance, the tour’s audio team required a wireless solution capable of delivering exceptional sonic performance alongside the reliability demanded by modern stadium productions.
At the centre of that workflow is the Sound Devices Astral platform, with Astral ARX16 receivers and Astral HH wireless microphones deployed across the production. Led by Front of House Engineer Derek Brener, Monitor Engineer Lewis Lowder, and RF Technician Diego Correa, the team selected the system to simplify an increasingly complex RF environment while providing the flexibility, stability, and audio quality required for one of the industry’s most technically demanding touring productions.
The success of any large-scale touring production is built on the coordination and precision of the crew behind the scenes. For After Hours Til Dawn, the production team has fostered a culture centred on preparation, with every department committed to the same exacting standard of execution. That shared attention to detail, coupled with what the team describes as a healthy level of paranoia, ensures every system is thoroughly checked and every contingency considered before the audience enters the stadium.
“We’re all in this together and we’re constantly looking for ways to iron out even the smallest problems in the setup,” explains Brener. “It gets very tricky for the size of stages we’re working now, however, so that’s led us to explore new solutions.”
“We’re always paying attention to changes in audio and wireless technology to ensure we’re delivering the best possible product for both the artist and the audience,” adds Lewis. “Ultimately, we’re trying to deliver something consistent, but sometimes something comes along that makes you want to rock the boat a little for the sake of getting an ‘extra gear’ of fidelity or RF range.”
“We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, but when the Astral devices started coming along, we saw an opportunity to make a smart upgrade that would positively impact the show without drastically changing anything for [The Weeknd]’s performance.”
The Astral HH handheld provided better headroom and fidelity for the audio overall, compared to the team’s previous wireless setup. The results were immediate. “It really sounds like a wired microphone to me- not something you can say for most wireless units,” Brener says. “It’s a really flexible mic in terms of aesthetics and customization as well, so we tricked it out in a gold shell and used [The Weeknd]’s favoured mic capsule and he took to it without saying anything- the ultimate compliment!”
The RF end of the equation has Correa utilizing an Astral ARX16 receiver with another unit as a redundant backup. Managing RF on stages of this side presents its own unique challenges, which he was eager to tackle with the Astral-series increased range and flexibility of frequencies from 169-1525MHz with built-in Real Time Spectrum Analyzer. “We were really excited when we first heard about Astral and its wide-band frequency capabilities,” Correa adds. “We’re on a monster stage here- long and wide- so we need our RF capabilities to be strong, reliable, and versatile to deal with any number of issues that can crop up in a production of this size.”
“We used to just throw voltage at the problem, anything to get another 50-100 feet out of the system, so realizing we wouldn’t have to do that anymore was a major help!”
“It gets tricky with these ranges so you do everything you can to make things efficient and stable,” he continues. “Having Astral gives us the ability to pivot in ways we never could before. We figure these issues out in minutes rather than hours, and account for all these variable ingredients that make the job challenging. It really helps with the paranoia, and has given the team one less thing to worry about!”
“It felt very smooth going to Astral HH and Astral ARX16 and we’re impressed,” concludes Brener. The Sound Devices guys really thought of everything.”
See more on the official Sound Devices website.
