Recently reunited on stage at Puskas Arena in Budapest, pop-rock band Hungária formed in 1967 by singer/guitarist/keyboardist Miklós Fenyő to become one of the Hungary's most popular bands during early 1980s. With the stadium filled with more than 50,000 fans, Allen & Heath mixing was chosen for both FOH and monitors.
The sound rig featured dLive S7000 control paired with DM MixRacks – the largest Surface offered by Allen & Heath’s flagship digital mixing platform with the MixRacks offering 128 input channels and 64 mix outputs with a configurable 64-bus architecture. The FOH MixRack fed the PA through AES/EBU and redundant analogue outputs.
The FOH team comprised engineers Daniel Toth and Zsolt Gyulai. Toth, the chief engineer, brought his extensive experience in large-scale arena concerts and festivals with Gyulai handled sound design tasks using external insert plug-ins.
Both used Waves Soundgrid integration so that every lead vocal and instrument group received plug-in support from Waves SuperRack.
The monitor mix for the musicians and lead vocalists was handled by engineer Jozsef Sodar sending 12 monitor mixes to 30 wedges, six stereo IEMs and eight Allen & Heath ME-1s on stage. ME-1 Personal Monitors give control on up to 40 channels with the top-panel ambient mics to keep performers in touch with the stage sound to communicate with each other without needing to remove their earpieces.
Sound engineer Tamas Ditzmann was also on-hand as dLive System Support specialist, having designed the Allen & Heath system used for the concert. Ditzmann oversaw the ME-1 Personal Monitors for the gig.
The band’s elaborate set-up included 90 analogue inputs for band, vocalists and B-stage instruments, with an additional 16 Dante inputs for wireless mics on the lead vocals.
‘Overall, we can say that the Allen & Heath dLive system fully met and exceeded the challenges of a stadium-sized concert,’ Toth reports. ‘It provided exceptional sound quality and reliability.’
More: www.allen-heath.com
