DPA Microphones Underpin AIR's Immersive Moon Safari Anniversary Tour

As AIR marks the global anniversary of its landmark debut, Moon Safari, the French duo set out to match the record's fidelity on stage while placing audiences inside a fully immersive soundscape.

Monitor engineers Julien Vouillon and Florentin Convert pursued both aims by building their setup around DPA Microphones for their clarity, precision and natural imaging.

With a background in album-grade live sound, Vouillon seized the tour as the moment to fully adopt immersive monitoring. "Since the rise of in-ears, a concert has to sound like the record—both at front of house and in the monitors," he explained. "AIR's music demands that level of detail and space. The system is centered around binaural processing via spatial audio processing software (SPAT), feeding the musicians a spatially accurate, responsive ‘room’ inside their in-ears. But the immersive mix only worked with captured ambience that was stunningly clean and true. That's where DPA came in."

To anchor the immersive field, the team chose the DPA 5100 Mobile Surround Microphone. "Our goal was to get the musicians to listen to their own album, live," said Vouillon. "The first time I heard what the DPA 5100 delivered, it was incredible. The respect for timbre is such that it offers total transparency. To my ears, it has no intrinsic flaw: it reproduces exactly what it captures, exactly as it is, exactly where you are."

Florentin Convert immediately recognised the 5100 as the right fit for their approach. "It's discreet, easy to use and reproduces the natural 3D of the room," he explained. "With SPAT, it adds the air and space that are always missing in classic in-ears." Across more than 80 shows, placement was refined, with the mic ultimately positioned low and directly in front of the stage for the most natural result.

Supplementing the main surround capture, the crew employed DPA’s pencil mics — the 2012 Compact Cardioid, 2015 Wide Cardioid and 2017 Shotgun — to feed ambience. As Vouillon noted: "A crucial point was minimizing the delay between front-of-house and the ambience. If the system was too offset, the musicians would feel it immediately. The solution was adding a pair of DPA 2015s in ORTF stereo format facing the stage, helping musicians feel grounded in the physical space."

To convey audience energy, the DPA 2012 and 2017 models became key. Convert explained: "With the 5100 and the 2015s, we were able to reproduce the room well, but there was still a lack of impact on the applause. When we added an XY pair of DPA 2012s in the centre, complementing the 2017s on stage, the sound image became more precise and natural, and the applause finally came forward without compromising tonal balance."

All DPA sources were routed into three discrete immersive "rooms" in SPAT — main, stage and applause — before returning to the console for the in-ear blend. "At first, we were opening and closing the applause bus manually, in a classic approach, but with SPAT and the DPA 2012 and 2017 mics," Convert said. "Then we automated it with sidechain compression triggered by the music. When the band plays, it compresses; when the music stops, it naturally opens back up."

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