DiGiCo Quantum Consoles Power AIR’s "Moon Safari" World Tour

The international tour celebrating the 27th anniversary of AIR’s landmark album Moon Safari has set a new benchmark for live audio fidelity. Utilizing a DiGiCo Quantum 338 at Front of House and a Quantum 7 at the monitor position, the production achieved such precision that the upcoming live album, The Athens Concert, was created entirely from the monitor mixes with no studio remixing required. Monitor engineer Julien Vouillon leveraged the Quantum 7’s processing power to recreate the band’s meticulous studio sound within a challenging, highly reflective 14-metre plexiglass stage structure.

It has been 27 years since Moon Safari was released, catapulting AIR to global stardom, seemingly overnight. The album changed how the world thought about French music and set the tone for global electronic music for years to come. Powered by the DiGiCo Quantum 338 at Front of House and Quantum 7 at the monitor position, AIR’s Moon Safari Live tour has been more than just a nostalgic trip down memory lane. The band has garnered five-star reviews in every country they have visited, thanks to the unique stage design and precision of the audio mixes for throughout the 124 dates.

Monitor engineer Julien Vouillon played a central role in ensuring the sonic identity of this landmark album, delivering a faithful and consistent listening experience for the band, regardless of the constraints imposed by the scenography or the venue. With precise mic'ing, faithful recreation of the original sounds and total sonic clarity, the end result was so good it was used for the live album in its entirety, with no studio remix required.

“DiGiCo have designed some of the world’s finest monitor consoles, establishing themselves as reference tools for the most demanding and complex productions,” Vouillon says. “The capabilities of the Quantum consoles in terms of input/output counts and processing power have opened entirely new possibilities. They offer a decisive advantage to anyone dealing with particularly complex technical and artistic requirements and have allowed me to realise ideas I had been developing for years.”

The tour’s live album was recorded in Odeon of Herodes Atticus, in the heart of the Acropolis of Athens, and was created entirely from the monitor mixes for the band. As Vouillon expands, this unique recording choice could only have been achieved with the DiGiCo Quantum 7 at the heart of the system.

“For AIR and their close collaborators, that night became legendary,” Vouillon recalls. “From the very first playback of the recording, it was clear that we had captured something extraordinary. The monitor mix sounded like an album, already perfectly balanced, but it also represented a new way of producing a live album with the mix being taken directly from the monitor console, rather than front of house. Most are reworked in a studio, often with a reduced dynamic range, making them feel closer to a studio record. This recording preserved all the energy, breathing, and authenticity of a live performance. That is precisely what makes it unique.”

The Athens Concert, AIR’s first-ever live album, is set to be released on April 18, 2026, capturing the performance with an unprecedented level of fidelity and realism.

The Quantum 7 was Vouillon’s console of choice thanks to the intuitive workflow and high-quality audio processing. For him, only DiGiCo consoles provide the speed, ease of use and efficiency required for every performance.

“Despite the Quantum 7’s ability to manage an extremely large number of simultaneous mixes, the user interface remains remarkably intuitive and ergonomic, enabling fast and efficient workflows,” he continues. “Access to parameters is immediate, allowing instant responses even in the most critical situations. The introduction of 32-bit I/O conversion cards has further reinforced DiGiCo’s advantage in pure audio quality, delivering exceptional clarity and transparency, particularly at 96 kHz.”

Vouillon’s weeks of preparation had clear results in the recording because for AIR, the whole goal of the tour was to perform the entire album live on stage while staying true to the original sounds, reproducing the mix of this iconic album as faithfully as possible.

“From the very first weeks of rehearsals AIR were excited to return to playing live and experience a sound on stage that matched the quality they are accustomed to in the studio,” he continues. “Long celebrated for their meticulous studio work, AIR found that this tour marked the first time their live listening experience truly equalled their studio standards. It was also the first time their onstage performance fully reflected the precision and quality of their entire recorded catalogue.”

Not only did the audio reflected AIR’s exacting attention to detail, the visual spectacle of the show was also breath-taking. The band performed every night inside a large cuboid, 14 metres wide, four deep and three high. Made with clean, sharp lines of plexi-glass and metal, the surfaces were highly reflective. It was a challenging space to work with and one that focussed Vouillon’s mind immediately.

“The design created an intense accumulation of reflections and floating echoes,” he continues. “It was, quite literally, one of the most acoustically challenging environments we could have imagined. From day one, this constraint required me to carefully select microphones capable of minimizing the acoustic imprint of the space. We used Sennheiser MD 445 for vocals, along with DPA 2012 and 4055, plus Beyerdynamic M160 for the drums. These capsules allowed us to significantly reduce the influence of the box on the overall sound. I then applied a specific processing chain to each microphone, cleaning every source and optimizing the signal-to-noise ratio before producing the sounds themselves.”

Once he had a system in place, the set design ultimately became a significant advantage on tour. By transporting the structure from city to city, the musicians experienced the same onstage acoustics every night. For the final concert at the Grand Palais in Paris, a spectacular but challenging venue for amplified music, the team knew they would have to work hard to balance the 43-piece symphony orchestra that would accompany the band. Even with exacting microphone choice and placement, Vouillon found that utilizing Waves plugins was a great way to process each source individually.

“Plugin processing was essential for preparing the mix, ensuring it faithfully reflected both the sonic aesthetic of the album and the specific demands of live performance,” he says. “With the arrival of the Quantum series, the use of Mustard equalizers and compressors added an analogue character to the extremely precise and detailed sound of the DiGiCo digital environment. For me, it allows a perfect balance of fidelity, musicality and efficiency in a live setting. In my opinion, this represents the most significant improvement from the Quantum series.”

Vouillon makes extensive use of plugins throughout his set up, with options like PSE, Sibilance, Smack Attack and F6 inserted into his Quantum 7 channel strips. For accurate recreation of AIR’s studio sounds, or to add precise tonal colour and character, Vouillon also applies plugins like SSL E-Channel, SSL G-Channel, CLA-2A, CLA-76 and API 550. For effects, he also selectively uses plugins like Magma Springs, H-Delay, H-Reverb and Abbey Road. These are routed as required for each song. His choices for reverbs are external stand-alone units, controlling them via MIDI and program change from his Quantum 7. This method was particularly useful for visiting guest artists like Charli XCX, Thomas Mars and Andrew VanWyngarden.

“I sincerely believe we could not have achieved the same results with any system other than DiGiCo,” Vouillon expands. “The advent of the Quantum series has allowed DiGiCo to maintain its technological lead in system resources while significantly enhancing signal processing through the Mustard processors, for both equalization and dynamic control. For all these reasons, DiGiCo remains my console of choice, fully capable of meeting both my technical and artistic requirements.”

During the tour, after successfully reproducing the album mix, Vouillon turned his attention to a new challenge, faithfully capturing the sound of the venue and the presence of the audience. Working closely with Florentin Convert, he identified the ideal microphone setup to achieve the most natural and precise spatial image. Together, they adapted the DPA 5100 surround microphone—originally designed for film and broadcast—for use in a live concert environment.

“When introducing an immersive dimension to in-ear monitoring, the aim is not to create a dramatic or exaggerated effect, but to remain as true to reality as possible. The goal is for the mix to feel completely natural.”

Vouillon’s immersive monitor mixes redefined the meaning of immersive, delivering a fully transparent experience for the band. The objective was not to elicit an emotional reaction, but to create the most realistic listening environment possible. This distinctive approach made the mixes exceptionally effective for a live album, elevating them to a point where the musicians no longer notice the equipment, allowing the music to be experienced exactly as it was performed.

“The concert at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus remains, for me, the most unforgettable memory. It was a dream to play in this historic venue and I had never imagined that I would be mixing AIR’s first live album there, without any need for studio remixing,” Vouillon concludes. “Our front-of-house engineer, Philippe Gloaguen, is a seasoned user of a different console brand and transitioned to the DiGiCo environment for this tour. The change was necessary to ensure perfect alignment between the album sound I had recreated for the in-ear monitors and the front-of-house mix. After two years working with this setup, he became fully convinced and agreed that we could never have achieved such results with any other brand.” 

www.digico.biz