With more that 30 years spent supporting performances, conferences, and celebrations in the area around Pueblo, Colorado, to its credit, DeHerrera Event Services has played its part in concerts for up to 5,000 people (Foghat, Jimmy Eat World, War) and regularly runs the AVL systems for the three free stages of Colorado’s State Fair. Its bread-and-butter work – providing modest AVL at weddings, graduation ceremonies – requires something smaller that large-format consoles, however…

Accordingly, company owner Wayne DeHerrera purchased two Ashly Audio digital mixers, which combine the features of his larger consoles with a workflow that, ‘has anyone I’ve shown it to up and running confidently after just five minutes’.

‘We needed something that had all of the functionality, sound quality and reliability of our larger consoles, but until the Ashly digiMIX24 came along, smaller consoles always came up short on at least one of those requirements,’ DeHerrera explains. ‘We’ve been using Ashly equalizers and processors for years, and they’ve always been reliable, high-quality pieces of equipment.’ Based on the frequency and overlap of those smaller-sized jobs and the mixer’s affordability, DeHerrera purchased two digiMIX24s.

DeHerrera’s team had its first opportunity to use the new mixer at a Dan and Shay concert where she show required all the channels of the company’s largest large-format console, so the new digiMIX24 filled in to cover Playing With Fire, a local Rock band that opened. Next, the company used both digiMIX24s to provide sound for 14 area graduation ceremonies and a handful of other events, such as an MMA cage fight. Although power never dropped during any of those events, DeHerrera said he was glad the digiMIX24 always remembers its current configuration in the event of a brown out or blown circuit-breaker.

‘When I first saw the spec for the digiMIX24, I was sceptical of its single moving fader,’ DeHerrera said. ‘But after I got my hands on it, I realised that it becomes whatever I need at the moment. The workflow on the touchscreen is so well thought out that it takes noticeably fewer moves to accomplish a task compared to our larger consoles, and the fader is there to make the moves intuitive and easy. People have no trouble learning it, and my crew has made good use of Ashly’s iPad app. They can walk the event space and tune the system or mix remotely. Every input, output, and bus has plenty of powerful DSP so we don’t feel at a loss for the features of our larger consoles.’

As he prepares to cover the five stages of Pueblo’s annual Chili & Frijoles Festival, an event that draws over 100,000 people to downtown Pueblo, DeHerrera is going to get two more Ashly digiMIX24s. That way, the company can use one of its large consoles on the main stage and a digiMIX24 each on the four smaller stages.