Allen & Heath has folded its flagship dLive effects engine, RackUltra FX, into the SQ5+, SQ6+ and SQ7+ consoles and pushed it to existing Avantis desks via a 2.0 firmware update, meaning the mixers that run sound at clubs and mid-size venues worldwide no longer need an outboard rack for vocal tuning, harmonizing or saturation.
Fabric London replaced the sound systems in Room 2 (unchanged since 2016) and Room 3 (since 2018) with bespoke rigs co-designed in-house with Norwegian specialists NNNN Audio, installed in five days ahead of a reopening event.
For its 22nd birthday, Cologne club Bootshaus turned its main floor into a permanent L-Acoustics system that splits a DJ's ordinary stereo mix into a moving, three-dimensional field, billed as a world first for the format.
Funktion-One has thrown its weight behind object-based spatial audio, adopting the Holophonix platform and proving it in a Dutch venue, while insisting raw sound quality comes before any immersive trickery.
Washington DC's Echostage, the highest-ranked club in North America, has installed an L-Acoustics L2 system, the kind of line array built for arenas, in one of the first permanent US installs of the box.
L-Acoustics and d&b audiotechnik, the two firms that almost never agree, have co-launched SDE with SoundPLAN: a shared file that makes festival noise predictions comparable across rival rigs for the first time.
For its 35th anniversary, [[venue:ministry-of-sound|Ministry of Sound]] replaced The Box's sound system for the first time in 15 years, picking [[label:kv2-audio|KV2 Audio]] after auditioning six brands and installing two finalists in the room for a week each.
