Prior to 2020, Phil Reynolds spent 16 years working in PA deployment, designing and consulting on speaker setups for large concert venues like Coachella and touring with bands like Foo Fighters and Odesza.

“I was doing big PA, big sound type stuff.”

When the pandemic hit, Phil’s specialty got hit hardest. So he thought: How can I adapt my superpower—networking and controlling audio systems for live in-person concerts—to live streaming events that deliver the same excitement and fidelity of being there in person?

Phil set out to learn how to do everything he’d been doing in-person, remotely. The technology wasn’t there yet, but he knew it was getting closer quickly. Through learning and conversations with leading AV brands like Dante, he began to build a new model that would allow him to remotely manage and deliver high-fidelity streaming audio and video. That meant feeding every aspect of a live event—every audio and camera feed, every intercom channel, every lighting fixture—into a private data center so that each could be controlled and mixed from anywhere in the country. And he built that model around Dante.

Dante:

What size venues do you work with?

Phil:

Corporate boardrooms to Coachella-sized venues, and everything in between. And no matter what size, we can hand the AV controls over to an engineer—or team of engineers—anywhere in the country.
 

Dante:

What’s a typical day like for you?

Phil:

I’m usually figuring out the best approach for a project. Like right now I’m thinking, How can I broadcast something from my office, route it to Nashville, up to New York, over to California, and then back here… how fast can I make that happen with the least amount of hardware?

Dante:

What Dante software are you using?

Phil:

I’m working with a large church right now. We built a custom Dante bridge between the church and our studio that can handle up to 256 channels. How do we transport the audio? That’s Dante Connect. How do we monitor it? That’s That’s Dante Connect. It monitors latency and packets. And Dante Virtual Soundcard is for recording. So that’s the kit we have at both ends. And then I’m able to route that stream anywhere using Dante Domain Manager. So everything’s interconnected in a way that’s foolproof and simple.

Dante:

What Dante-enabled products are you using?

Phil:

I’m a huge Focusrite RedNet fan. I was one of the first engineers to take that on the road when I was touring with The Killers way back when. But really our secret sauce is our custom servers—custom firmware and software builds. And then we mainly use Cisco for our network fabric along with custom overlays, and what we call elastic bridging.

Dante:

What Dante features are you most excited about?

Phil:

Remote monitoring with Dante. It’s on the top of our list but just haven’t gotten to it yet.
 

Dante:

Are you using Dante in any surprising ways?

Phil:

Big entities like ESPN and CBS all use Dante Connect, but I feel like I’m one of the first people to bring it to a civilian level. And our clients are shocked at what they’re seeing. They’re saying “How are you doing this with such low bandwidth?” And they’re shocked by the simplicity of it. Like for one of our recent projects we didn’t send anybody to the venue, we just had them patch a rack into the internet, use SDI for video and Dante for a bridge, and their main comment was “That was so easy.”

“That’s where we outshine a lot of these big entities. Yes, they’re streaming, but I feel like they’re just delivering the package, not the service. What we offer is an agnostic and super simple way to manage streams.”

Dante:

Do you still worry every time one of your remote events goes live?

Phil:

There’s just anticipation. I feel like every time I hit the go button, it’s like I’m back waiting for that first kick drum or vocal to come out of the PA at Coachella. Once I hear that, then it’s go time.
 

Dante:

What are you excited about for the future of this industry?

Phil:

A lot of artist management and production managers are just starting to wrap their head around the idea of taking control and management of their live event offsite, and that’s exciting. The tone has changed in the last year; it’s starting to be a conversation.

But what I’m really excited about is empowering artists. We can help a band stream their own show and that show can be mixed by their favorite engineer from anywhere in the world, delivering that experience directly to their audience with a quality that’s through the roof.

And empowering engineers. Because when you’ve mixed say the Grammy’s or Beyoncé, you’re at that level, now you can sit down in your studio and you’re not on a platform that was just pulled out of a truck six hours earlier and bashed around. All that angst is gone and now you can focus on your job. And that is a different animal. Now all you’re thinking about is how the audience is going to experience this event.