Los Angeles, CA (September 18, 2025)—The Weeknd’s After Hours Til Dawn Tour has been on the road since 2022 and already has substantial legs through Europe and Latin America lined up for 2026. While millions of fans have packed stadiums to hear the multi-Grammy winner’s smooth vocals, no one listens closer than the artist’s audio team, led by Front of House engineer Derek Brener, monitor engineer Lewis Lowder, and RF technician Diego Correa. For much of the tour, they faced a mystery when it came to The Weeknd’s vocals and now they’ve found the answer.
Brener has mixed the artist’s live sound a decade, starting that run with the ultimate high-profile debut: the 2015 Coachella headlining set that pushed The Weeknd’s career into overdrive. Since then, the venues have only gotten bigger, with the current tour taking over stadiums worldwide—and that’s where the mystery starts.
“I’d been chasing this very subtle intermodulated distortion that had begun to manifest once the systems got larger,” says Brener. It was a barely perceptible audio issue, but once he heard it, he couldn’t un-hear it and swore to track it down. The research started in Brener’s garage before the tour rehearsals kicked off.
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“I drove everyone crazy with it because I was the only one who noticed at first, but once I pointed it out to Diego and Lewis, we all heard it and wanted it gone. We came to realize that it was the result of the combination of [the Weeknd]’s unique vocal timbre and the hyping of compression and high-end. This being companded gave us this high-end ‘rizz’ in certain areas. After months of trying to figure this out and swapping things out multiple times for other brands, we were introduced to the Sound Devices Astral and the Astral HH product line, and realized we finally had a solution.”
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Switching the artist’s wireless mic system to Sound Devices’ Astral ARX16 receiver and Astral HH wireless microphones made the difference, as the audio team deciuded the Astral HH handheld provided better headroom and fidelity for the audio overall. More importantly, its use of Sound Devices’ Gain Forward technology removed the need for companding—and thus the mystery sound.
“It really sounds like a wired microphone to me – not something you can say for most wireless units,” Brener says. “It’s a really flexible mic in terms of aesthetics and customization as well, so we tricked it out in a gold shell, used [The Weeknd]’s favored Sennheiser 5235 capsule, and he took to it without saying anything—the ultimate compliment.”
