With a warehouse full of touring gear grounded by coronavirus’ decimation of live events, Latvian rental company 3S SIA converted its Riga headquarters into a fully equipped livestream performance space. Created in partnership with local broadcaster TVNET, the resulting 3S Lockdown Sessions have reached tens of thousands of isolating music fans each week since they debuted in March, with performances from popular artists including Latvian Blues Band, Aminata, Samanta Tina, Lauris Valters, Ozols, Indygo and Riga Reggae.
When devising a mixing system for the sessions, the 3S team turned its own extensive Allen & Heath inventory, which includes four dLive systems. An A&H dLive S7000 Surface was paired with a DM64 MixRack to mix the broadcast, with a gigaAce split enabling connection to the Avantis console handling monitors. The Avantis is teamed with a Klang 3D spatialisation engine, with OSC Midi commands allowing most parameters to be controlled from the desk.
‘Allen & Heath was the natural choice for these sessions,’ says 3S SIA owner and senior FOH engineer, Einars Cintins. ‘Reliability is really important for me, and with A&H I know everything is going to work perfectly. One of the things I appreciate about dLive is that the Cat5 between stage and FOH only carries control data, so even if something happens to my cables, I can pull out my laptop or iPad and the show will go on.’
A DX32 expander loaded with Prime Input premium 8-channel preamp modules handles vocals and acoustic instruments. ‘We only received the Prime modules in March, so the Lockdown Sessions was our first chance to try them on a live show,’ Einars explains. ‘You can clearly hear the difference on the studio monitors and I can’t wait to hear them on the full-size arena PA system.’
DX168 and DX012 expanders help to distribute I/O between the warehouse and a pair of offices which had been converted into the mix position and video control room. The dLive system was fitted with a Dante 128x128 card for multitrack recording, along with a Waves card for connection to a DiGiGrid DGS server for external plug-ins.
The 3S Lockdown Sessions are set to continue brightening the days of Latvian fans until the end of lockdown.
More: www.allen-heath.com
