California-based audio engineer Jerry Lopez is touring South America with Latin Grammy award-winning singer/songwriter Carla Morrison, and an Allen & Heath dLive mixing system – one of eight that he currently owns.
‘Allen & Heath really does things right, in terms of constantly updating with new features.,’ he says. ‘Thanks to dLive’s MCA feature, I am able to run both front of house and monitors for Carla with my compact CTi1500 control surface – I simply set up spills so that I can minimise the amount of faders required on my top layer.’
Lopez has been a dLive user since 2015 and, over time, his appreciation for the Allen & Heath flagship has continued to grow. He now runs a rental and production house called Jerry Rig Audio & Creative Solutions.
For his outing with Carla Morrison, Lopez also has along a DM0 dLive Mixrack, which handles the system’s full 128-channel 96kHz FPGA processing, and four DX168s stageboxes for distributed I/O across the stage.
‘The first stagebox is for drums,’ he explains. ‘I use a second one for in-ears, and another for wireless.’ The DX stageboxes each provide 16 dLive mic preamps and eight line outputs in a portable form factor, and can also be mounted in a standard 19-inch rack.’
In terms of processing, Lopez makes use of dLive’s Deep emulations on the tour: ‘I use preamp models for warmth and colouration on every single mic channel. I also use the OptTronik compressor on every channel.’
For his main mix, he employs the new Bus Compressor, which was added in dLive v1.9 firmware. The bus compressor model brings the sound of a fabled VCA bus compressor into dLive – perfect for adding sonic cohesion and glue to mix and sub-groups.
Lopez also has a 128-channel 96kHz Waves module that he uses solely for multitracking and virtual soundchecking. ‘I see no need to complicate things with an external plug-in server,’ he says. ‘With all the dLive processing available to me. I prefer having things compact. I can set everything up quickly and have fun mixing without needing a whole crew.’
More: www.allen-heath.com
