Rufus "Wants Two" Use XTA

Canadian-born singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright has a distinctive style of theatrical pop that has won him awards in his home country and created a following not just on home ground, but around the world. His recent four week European tour took him to a variety of venues, not all of which had the most up to date audio systems that Wainwright’s Front of House engineer, Matt Manasse, could have wished for.

“Some venues were better than others,” explains Manasse. “We played everything from nasty night clubs to beautiful concert halls and theatres, so we had to rely on local racks and stacks for the shows in continental Europe. It would have been really difficult to carry enough PA to cover such a variety of venues. And at this point it’s just not cost effective.

“We had an Adamson Y10 line array for the UK dates with XTA DP226s running the system, which made an enormous difference.”

“I have an XTA D2 over Wainwright’s vocals to eliminate unwanted peaks in his voice. I use the D2 rather than the console for this because I want to compress or limit more than one frequency at a time, and I find it easier to do it with an external unit. Other than that, I am using only the console’s internal effects, four reverbs and the tap delay. It’s really easy and it sounds great.”

System technician Aaron Ross is in charge of the XTA DP226s, which he uses as simple crossovers for the system, controlled by XTA’s new AudioCore 8 software via a wireless tablet,” he explains.

“I’m using one DP226 as a master at Front of House. I like having the rest of the crossovers in the amp racks because it means I can have as many zones as I want. One day I can have a rig set up as left/right flown, left/right on the ground with in fills and out fills, and then next day have just left and right and there’s no repatching involved. Just a little bit of work in AudioCore and you’re done. And it’s very accurate.”