UK - Entec, one of the UK's longest established lighting and sound companies, has put its faith in Lake after adding a number of LM 44 digital audio system processors to its extensive inventory.
The company works across a huge diversity of events, including concert tours, live events, corporate shows, exhibitions, television, theatres and open air festivals, branding exercises, sporting and equestrian shows, military bands, religious gatherings and such like. Recently, they have looked after acts like Blur, Gorillaz, Slayer, Bootleg Beatles, Skunk Anansie, and many more.
Ed Hammond, technical engineer at Entec Sound, commented, "As a company, we are involved in a lot of different events, so any kit we invest in has to be both flexible and reliable. The graphic interface in the Lake Controller has always been amazing, and from the beginning, it's that interface that people want at front of house. That demand drives what we put into our drive racks, which is LM 44s now.
"We use the AES in/out, so we keep the audio digital as much as possible now, and Dante is something that we're going to look at going to in the future for our full return system, so the LM Series is perfect," he continued.
Through his extensive experience in the live event industry, Hammond was very aware of the capabilities of Lake Processing, as he states. "I started using Lake Processing about 7 or 8 years ago with the original Lake Contours, and my first experience of them was excellent. Then of course, the DLP came in and that kind of changed the game in terms of drive rack systems and crossovers as well."
With this knowledge of the Lake technology, it was an easy decision for Hammond where Entec should invest, as he testifies. "We were always looking to invest more in the Dolby Lake technology, and when we found out that was getting phased out, we were very interested in seeing what product was going to replace it. With a company like Lab.gruppen driving the technology forward, they came out with the LM Series and we were very interested to see what it could do.
"The LM 44s came in for a demo, and we realised that you can stack them into a rack, and two of them equals a Dolby Lake 8/8 Mesa. In fact, you can go further than that, as well as the fact that all the units can all pick up each other's Dante inputs.
"That's when we realised that the LM 44 was the unit for us, as we could scale it to the job at hand. We can have as many as we want at front of house or at the stage end, use them as a Dante breakouts if we need to do long signal runs, so that added flexibility is one of the biggest reasons why we chose to invest in Lake's LM Series."
