American musician and singer-songwriter Jake Smith – more readily recognised as The White Buffalo – recently played two nights at Belly Up in Solana Beach in California recently, he invited mix engineer, guitarist and producer Mike Butler (Fleetwood Mac, The Rolling Stones, etc) to record the performances for a double live album.

Eager to try out his Audient Evo Expanded System, he used an Evo 16 interface and two SP8 mic preamps, with a MacBook Pro M1 running Pro Tools, which he decided would be ‘robust and powerful enough to handle recording the shows’.

Butler discovered Evo Expanded System in 2023, when upgrading his home recording set-up. Evo 16 is a full recording interface with eight mic preamps, a monitor section with two independent headphone outputs, and expandable via Adat to 24 channels. He already had one Evo SP8, as he explains:…

‘I had used a 16 channel version of this setup to record a full album project in my house last year with great results, so expanding the system to 24 channels for this seemed to be a no-brainer.

‘The band did a full soundcheck, running through various songs and I set all my mic levels from the Evos,’ he continues. ‘The ability to save all these settings using the Evo software meant that I knew everything would be consistent the following night. All I had to do was open the project and all my levels were exactly the same.

‘I can’t tell you what a luxury it was to be able to walk into the venue the next night and have everything set up exactly as we had left it.

‘In the end, the Evo Expanded System worked exactly as I hoped it would. It is an intuitive, easy to use, great sounding and reliable system that is equally at home in the studio and on location, and the fact that the system is so affordable blows me away. I can’t think of any other system at this price point that would even come close to the quality.’

Butler is currently turning nearly five hours and 50 performances into a cohesive, 20-song live album – and clearly enjoying it: ‘I’m really looking forward to getting to the mixing stage in the coming weeks because I know I’ll have no issue with the sound quality of the tracks.

‘There are already plans in the works for more location recordings with other artists,’ he adds, ‘and the Audient Evo Expanded System will be with me every step of the way.’

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