Pulling in more than 300,000 festivalgoers and entertained a worldwide audience through FM and streaming broadcast from it Main Stage, the 2018 Festival International de Louisiane in Lafayette, Louisiana, raised the stakes over last year’s event. Among the changes was the broadcast mix set-up.

‘Last year, I used an Allen & Heath GLD-80 digital mixer for this event and it was great,’ says Paul McCasland of Show And Tell Productions, who mixed the live broadcast from a temporary studio in the nearby Lafayette Science Museum. ‘This year, I needed more inputs so I tried out a dLive for the first time – and, I was able to figure out everything and do all of the routing and configuration before the first band started. It’s very intuitive.’

McCasland used an Allen & Heath dLive C Class C3500 system with DM0 MixRack to mix down to a stereo pair fed to another temporary studio in the museum, where radio station KRVS combined the four festival stages with live commentary and interviews using an Allen & Heath SQ5 digital mixer also supplied by Show And Tell.

‘I’ve been doing this particular event for over 15 years,’ he says. ‘This year, we had a 48-channel Dante split from the Main Stage fed directly to us over a fibre network.’

‘I have a couple of audience mics which add some “air” to the broadcast mix,’ he adds. ‘I dialed-out the wind noise on those mics with a high-pass filter and used the channel compressors when someone started screaming into a mic on the stage. And, I was very happy with the on-board effects like the reverb. The Allen & Heath effects sound great – I can’t say that enough.

‘Next year, we want to get the other stages into my mix with Dante splits,’ he closes. ‘I could handle all of them with one dLive. The beauty of this console is it’s pretty much what you want it to be.’

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