The Richard E Berry Educational Support Center in Houston, Texas, has completed a major update to its A/V systems, installing seven Allen & Heath dLive S Class Digital Mixing Systems and an ME Personal Mixing System. Serving the Cypress Fairbanks Integrated School District, as well as the greater Houston area, the centre hosts 4,000 annual events in five multi-purpose venues – arena, conference centre, theatre and two stadia. Ford Audio Video Systems provided the new A/V systems.

‘Our big goal in all of this was flexibility, because the Berry Center defines multi-use facility,’ says Ford AV Houston Division Job Center Manager, David Shriver.

The company installed an Allen & Heath gigaACE network and a second Dante network to supplement the centre’s existing Dante network. These networks allow several of the dLives to be relocated when needed, and facilitate resource sharing, recording and live and streaming broadcast from any venue. The conference centre can be subdivided into as many as 17 separate spaces.

‘One of the brilliant things with the dLive is that we could give them the flexibility to run each of these spaces as independent systems from one MixRack using an iPad or a laptop with the dLive Director software,’ Shriver notes.

Portable dLive Surfaces also allow separate FOH and monitor mixing for larger arena events, and FOH mixing from an audience location in the theatre. The centre’s ME Personal Mixing System serves performers in the arena, theatre or other venues as needed.

‘We have a standard, operational scene for each venue with at least one layer reserved for the engineer to set up and patch as needed and we’re using dLive processing for events like music groups in the theatre,’ says Berry Center Technical Systems Manager, Sean Ramsey.

Many events include broadcast and recording from the shared production/broadcast room: ‘We may do 25 graduations in a year, and each of those requires a stream,’ Ramsey says. ‘We also have live TV for the district through a public access channel.

‘When we started our search, we looked at a lot of mixers,’ he concludes. ‘But, there’s nothing else on the market that works as well for both major shows in the arena and auto-mixing in the conference centre. The original Berry Center systems had Allen & Heath iLive mixers, which made the transition easy. We’ve been very impressed with the flexibility of the dLive, and the overall quality is great.’

More: www.allen-heath.com