A pair of Allen & Heath dLive systems was recently deployed for an exuberant livestreamed charity concert by Swedish band, Louisiana Avenue. As the name suggests, the group conjured up a New Orleans Mardi-Gras atmosphere for a virtual audience of isolating fans with the aid of carnival drummers, whistles, feathers and glitter.
With less than a week to deliver the show, AV rental company, Scenteknik AVL AB handled all technical aspects of the performance, staged at the historic Cirkus arena in Stockholm, Sweden. Scenteknik chose a dLive S5000 Surface and DM48 MixRack for the livestream mix and another S5000 coupled with a DM64 on monitors. The two dLive systems were connected over a digital split using a pair of gigaACE cards, with a Dante card also fitted in the livestreaming S5000 for multi-track recording and virtual soundcheck.
Livestream engineer and head of audio at Scenteknik, Gustaf Kempe reports, “It was quite a challenging show to mix for many reasons. Since there wasn’t an audience in the theatre, we didn’t have to worry about the PA system, but we needed a decent side fill so the band would get more of a live feeling. They also had a sign language artist interpreting their songs live and as she was deaf, it was extra important that the side fill let her feel the vibrations of the music. We also had many feeds going to various places and needed to set up separate matrices for everything, which meant figuring out a good way of doing all these different mixes, while still sharing parts of the same L/R mix.”
The production enabled fans to participate live using Zoom, Facebook Live and Google Hangouts, and the band was able to interact with the audience via screens set up in front of the theatre’s empty seats. To minimise the possibility of feedback from listeners’ playback systems, matrices were used to create mix-minus feeds, and participants were muted during songs to ensure that only the band was audible. The audio feed from Zoom was used for crowd noise, with listeners cheering between songs. A portable DX168 expander was used to manage feeds to and from the various streaming platforms.
“Overall, the show went really well, and we were super happy with the results. Having dLive with us meant we were able to handle the high I/O count and feeds that we needed. It was also great to not have to carry an analogue split and instead use the gigaACE cards to feed the two desks, as this meant we were able to send signals back and forth seamlessly,” adds Kempe. “dLive’s versatile features just made this show very easy and I love that I have everything I need in the surface – all I need to do is simply flip up the desk, plug it into the DM64 and away we go.”
