Somewhere I belong with Linkin Park
- Live team
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
After a tumultuous period of loss, silence and reinvention, Linkin Park returned with a tour that re-examined what a live show has potential to be
Words Verity Butler | Images Chady Awad
Whether you’re like me and are at the older end of the Gen Z bracket and had the classic ‘rebellious phase’, or you’re simply someone who favours the rap or heavy metal genres of music, then it is highly likely that Linkin Park played a formative role in your life at some stage or another.
Well, they did for me anyway. From the explosive hybrid of rap and metal that defined Hybrid Theory and Meteora, to the more experimental, atmospheric directions of their later albums, Linkin Park have always been there to help steer mopey teens (like myself) towards adulthood. Beyond my own Linkin Park phase, which has long been and gone, there exists an extremely dedicated fanbase that continues to pack out vast venues around the world to see the cult band perform.
Unfortunately, Linkin Park’s approach to performance was forced to drastically adapt due to very sad circumstances. When lead singer Chester Bennington passed away back in 2017, the remaining members of Linkin Park had no choice but to totally redefine what Linkin Park was – all while finding a way to preserve Bennington’s influence and legacy. After a seven-year hiatus, and the departure of old as well as the recruitment of new members, the band returned with a bang in 2024, with the release of their From Zero album.
Following this was the announcement of a 59-date arena tour across four continents in the second half of 2025. It proved to be a tour like no other for the band. A tightly choreographed and immersive experience, the tour blended performance, playback, broadcast, visual production and recording into a single organism. The aim was to have the show translate equally effectively for an attendee standing on the barricade, a fan watching through a live stream on the other side of the world or an editor pulling out segments months laterfor archival or documentary use.
Naturally, all of that put extraordinary pressure on the systems behind the scenes – especially when those systems needed to survive the unpredictable realities that come as part and parcel of an international tour.
Preparing for anything
With dates spanning various different continents and formats (including fly-in shows, television appearances and full-scale stadium productions), the From Zero tour demanded an audio and broadcast infrastructure that was both powerful and adaptable.
One night might involve a locally supplied PA system running Dante at 48kHz. The next could require AES, AVB or Madi. Fibre formats, clocking requirements and broadcast specs change depending on country, venue and crew. Throw in real-time failover and redundancy expectations, and suddenly the job is no longer just about sound quality, but resilience.
That responsibility fell to touring systems architect and engineer Ricki Cook, whose background reads like a roadmap of modern audio itself. He began in systems integration, moved into live and touring sound and later transitioned into broadcast work, a move that shaped how he thinks about signal flow, redundancy and interoperability.
It was during his broadcast work that he first encountered DirectOut products, tools that can navigate multiple formats and clock domains without fuss. He has been using them for over a decade, long before Linkin Park entered the picture.
So, when the opportunity arose to engineer Linkin Park’s front-of-house and broadcast systems, Cook didn’t hesitate. It was a chance to combine large-scale touring with broadcast-grade expectation, two worlds that often clash unless carefully managed.
“From the very beginning, the production manager said ‘be prepared for anything’. And I know there’s only one box that can literally do everything: the PRODIGY.MX,” he explains.
That philosophy of being prepared for anything became the guiding principle of the entire system design.
Setting the stage
Rather than building a single, idealised set-up that only works under perfect conditions, Cook approached the tour as an exercise in controlled unpredictability. The goal wasn’t to lock everything into one protocol or workflow but to create a system that could flex and adapt.
“There are very few devices on the market that can actually reach the same level of detail in a box that’s packaged to tour and has a usable interface,” he says. “We use globcon for all of our system monitoring with a Stream Deck interface for tactile control.”
That usability matters hugely. Touring environments are loud and often under-resourced. Gear that’s technically capable but difficult to manage under pressure is a liability. Cook’s solution was modular and transparent, letting engineers see what is happening at every point of the signal chain. The From Zero tour show deployed six PRODIGY Series devices with different roles throughout the audio and video ecosystem – each addressing a specific need without overcomplicating the bigger picture. When it came to the staging itself, there was one simple priority: nothing can stop the show. Seems straightforward enough, right?
No is usually the answer. But with the assistance of two PRODIGY.MP units dedicated to the keyboard and playback rigs (where they handled failover, Dante conversion and upsampling from 48kHz to 96kHz), the stage rigs could interface cleanly with the rest of the audio system while maintaining redundancy.
The rigs were designed and supplied by Fred Carlton of Nerdmatics, ensuring consistency across venues and touring legs. By managing conversion and redundancy at this level, any potential issues could be contained before they were able to ripple through the wider system. It may only be a quiet layer of protection, but it is one performers and engineers rely on implicitly.
Up front
For front of house, the system expands in both complexity and responsibility. A third PRODIGY.MP feeds the main PA, acting as a central hub for distribution and format translation. Alongside this sits a PRODIGY.MX in the effects rack, paired with a PRODIGY.MC that handles analogue inserts.
This part of the system is responsible for managing redundancy and change-over for a Digico Quantum 852 console, supplied by Sound Image, which is a Clair Global company. The audio is then sent to the Pro Tools recording system via Madi and Fourier transform engines through Dante. Pro Tools is used for both virtual sound check and archiving, while the Fourier transform engine delivers processing and plug-in management for the front-of-house mix.
“The PRODIGY.MX seamlessly manages the changeover between Digico engines and the rest of the rig,” Cook describes, so that “regardless of where the switch happens in the chain of devices, it is guaranteed to be glitch free.”
Redundancy was also a crucial factor. While often misunderstood as brute-force duplication, the most effective redundancy is subtle, allowing individual components to fail or switch without forcing everything else to follow.
“We’re using BLDS to carry out failover between the Fourier engines. So if one fails, BLDS loses tone and immediately switches to the backup,” Cook continues. The independence that this provides is a key advantage.
“This way, the Fouriers can failover without having to failover the engines on the console too, which would be much more disruptive to the show. Or we can switch the engines over on the console without having to force the Fourier to failover as well.
“Either way, Pro Tools never loses the feed, so we never lose a record or various feeds to downstream systems. It’s seamless.” For archival recording, post-production and content creation, that continuity is invaluable.
Linkin Park’s music has always been about connection. Between genres, between people, between emotion and between technology. On the 2025 From Zero tour, that philosophy extended well beyond the stage and into the audio-visual systems that supported every impressive performance.
The audience never glimpsed the clock isolation, the redundancy switching or the sample-rate conversions that were happening behind the scenes. Instead, they experienced a powerful, immersive show – night after night, city after city.
This feature was first published in the Spring 2026 issue of LIVE.
