Having recently acquired an Allen & Heath dLive S5000 Surface and DM64 MixRack, Denver-based Initial Production Group (IPG) has quickly put it to the test in the field. The full-service sound, light, video and media provider counts clients from corporate and religious events to the recent Professional Rodeo Cowboy (PRCA) awards ceremony in Las Vegas.
Production Manager MacKenzie Smith, mixes sound on many of the company’s engagements: ‘We’ve been sold on the advantages of digital mixers for some time,’ he says. ‘When you do a week-long event with different musical groups every day, things like scene recalls make life a lot easier.’
When a new system was required, IPG looked to Pro Tech Marketing for guidance – which led to dLive was the right choice: ‘What really impressed me was the flexibility,’ Smith reports. ‘You can make any fader into an input, output, DCA, aux send – anything. The other digital mixers we’ve used don’t have this kind of flexibility. And everything you need is right in front of you, not buried one or two menus deep, so you can sail through the console using its drag-and-drop touchscreens and move through a set-up and soundcheck so much faster. They’ve really thought this through well.’
IPG also provides Allen & Heath ME-1 Personal Mixers to the musicians at its events. ‘Every band I’ve put those on is blown away by the ME-1’s flexibility,’ Smith says. ‘You can access 48 channels on each ME-1 and each button can be a submix, like drums, so every musician can do their own custom mix. Plus, labels from the dLive automatically populate into the ME-1s, which is a huge time saver.’
Smith uses Allen & Heath’s dLive Director control software on a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 tablet to set up and operate some shows: ‘The iPad app gives you the basic stuff but the dLive Director lets me access everything from patching to effects processing to routing and channel assigns,’ he explains. ‘The dLive saves me from having to take so much extra outboard gear to a show. I’ve got all the effects and processing so whatever they throw at me I’m going to be able to handle. At a big, press-heavy show, I can dedicate 20 outputs for press feeds and still take care of everything else I need to do. And, being able to record 96kHz .wav files directly out of the console is another great feature. They sound exactly identical to the original – crystal clear.
‘We’re already considering a second dLive in the near future,’ he adds. ‘I’ve had a lot of experience with other digital mixers but I don’t know that I’d ever go back.’
