With more than 200,000 visitors coming to enjoy food, art, wine along and music, Texas’ annual GrapeFest was served with sound by Dallas/Fort Worth-based Epicenter Productions using an Allen & Heath dLive S Class Digital Mixing System.

As well as sound, Epicenter provided video production, lighting, staging, entertainment booking and consulting for all of the stages at GrapeFest. At the Main Stage, used by Sundance Head, Kalimba, Infinite Journey and others, Epicenter set up a full stereo FOH hang, a monitor system with dBTechnologies DVX DM TH self-powered wedges and Allen & Heath dLive S5000 Surfaces with DM64 MixRacks for both FOH and monitors.

‘We attended a dLive demo about a year ago and we all fell in love with the speed, performance and flexibility of the console,’ says Epicenter’s Jeff Krebs. ‘It’s a nice desk for us because it’s flexible enough to do both live sound and corporate. But, the sound quality of the console was, hands down, the reason we bought the desks. And, before they hit our dock we had one in route to George Strait in Vegas and the other in route to the high school musical awards in Austin.’

‘At GrapeFest, the dLive performed flawlessly,’ Krebs reports, ‘We set up scenes for FOH and monitors starting from a default that stores a basic festival patch. And, every place we go we save a file for that particular room and that event. So, we’ll have our file from Main Street next year already set up.

‘We had a little bit of concern because we’ve used the same two engineers on this stage for the past four or five years and they’re both George Strait guys. However, this year George Strait elected to do a benefit for the victims of the Houston flooding. So we had to put in two different engineers, neither of which had ever mixed on the dLive. But, within minutes, they were both up and running and we had four days of absolutely flawless performance.’

Krebs himself mixed a band called Strangelove, one of the top Depeche Mode tribute bands in the country: ‘Some die-hard Strangelove fans came to GrapeFest from California and one commented that this was the best the band had ever sounded and the truest to Depeche Mode,’ he says.