GLOBAL: A.R. Rahman’s 2025 Wonderment Tour — spanning North America, the UK, and culminating in major Indian cities including Hyderabad, Pune, and Mumbai — carried the unmistakable weight of a global icon whose work has earned two Academy Awards, six National Film Awards, two Grammys, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and a defining legacy in Indian and international cinema. Matching the musical finesse on stage was a sophisticated processing backbone built around Fourier Audio’s transform.engine, which both FOH engineer Riyasdeen Riyan and monitor engineer Mark Thomas integrated deeply into their workflows on DiGiCo Quantum338 consoles.

The transform.engine, a VST3 plugin host server designed for ultra-low-latency live processing, was partnered with Fourier’s transform.suite ’25 software bundle for the tour. The engineers first discovered the system online via social media, securing a demo unit before heading out. As Thomas recalls, “We were looking for a way to transition from Waves to a third-party platform, which would support third-party plugins and beyond. The transform.engine fit the bill perfectly. And now, over the course of the entire tour, both of us have completely adopted it into our workflows. It was that transformative.”

For Riyan, the platform enabled extensive real-time deployment of high-end VST3 tools including Oeksound Soothe Live, LiquidSonics’ Seventh Heaven and Cinematic Rooms bundles, Gullfoss Live, and SoundToys’ Crystallizer and EchoBoy. Beyond the broad selection, what defined its impact was the ability to bring studio-level precision into the live domain. “We can replicate live whatever effects that we are using in studio,” he explains. “Whomever the artists are that we are working with, including ARR, they are mostly from the studio world, and now we can replicate whatever they used in their original sessions, easily and reliably.” He adds that the accuracy extends to every parameter — “the kind and tempo of delay, the kind of effects, or the robotic vocals, or the harmonies… everything.”

Thomas, meanwhile, used the transform.engine primarily for Valhalla and LiquidSonics reverbs, plus Oeksound Soothe Live from the transform.suite ’25 bundle, inserted directly onto his mix bus. Working alongside a DMI-KLANG immersive IEM mixing system card, he notes that the major leap came from workflow freedom. “The sonic quality I previously wanted with using these plugins depended upon using a server,” he says. “With the transform.engine, I can load up exactly the plugins that I need and have the flexibility of using them with time-code synchronization—so virtually zero latency.”

Given the complexity of Rahman’s productions, with dense cueing and rapid parameter changes across snapshots, reliability was essential. “We have a lot of changes in the plugins’ parameters, which the transform.engine handles very well,” Thomas continues. The wider integration with the show’s video environment also accelerated their day-to-day pace: “The coordination of the plugin host within the video environment allows us to tweak settings on the fly without going into a third-party screen. So the workflow is quite very fast and flexible, compared to most other plugin workflows that we’ve previously used. It really is transformative.”