Juan March Foundation Auditorium offered the Madrid’s music lovers free access to live – generally classical – music. The auditorium recently called in local integrator Area Suena to update its audio mixing system, replacing it with a Allen & Heath dLive and SQ systems that allowi integration of two adjoining rooms over a Dante network for real-time streaming and recording of live shows for postproduction. Blackmagic Design video recording system and an Antelope Trinity master clock are also part of the upgrade.

The venue opened in 1975, with the decision to renew the audio and video mixing and recording systems made in 2019, in order to keep pace with the venue’s production ambitions. The Juan March Foundation has long relied on production company Scope Produccinones as a partner for the technical operation of the auditorium, with work beginning in early 2020.

Among the priorities of the project was the implementation of a high-quality live audio digital mixing system that could be integrated with a Pro Tools HDX platform. Concerts offered by the March Foundation are typically filmed for editing and subsequent use, as well as streamed. The venue needed to address the challenge of both audio and video signals being sent to an adjoining space – the Blue Room – which acts as an overflow when the main auditorium is full, with spectators to enjoying the performance on a projection screen. Concerts can also be followed from other spaces, such as the cafeteria, thanks to the open architecture of the system.

Given these requirements, the audio mixing system needed to be powerful, flexible, modular and capable of being easily integrated with other platforms – all factors addressed by Allen & Heath’s dLive system. Area Suena worked in conjunction with Audio-Technica Iberia (Allen & Heath’s distributor for Spain) directly to design and configure the system, which is built around a dLive S5000 control surface and DM48 MixRack.

The solution is made up of several ‘blocks’, some placed in the auditorium’s control room (a closed room, located at the end of the stalls, facing the stage) and others in a tech room next to the stage. The control room contains the dLive S5000 and DM48, with the S5000 equipped with a 128x128 Dante card and AES EBU card, as well as redundant power supplies. In the tech room there are two DX32 remote input and output racks, connected by redundant network cable to the DM48 brain.

One of the DX32 racks is equipped with 32 channels of analogue inputs; 16 of them on two Prime cards (eight channels each, studio quality) and two standard pre-cards (also with eight channels each). The second DX32 rack is equipped with three standard input cards (24 channels) and one analogue output card (eight channels). A total of 56 channels of remote analogue inputs are available, which are added to the 48 channels of the DM48 rack and the eight of the S5000 surface itself, located in the control, adding a total of 112 analogue inputs always available for routing, live mixing and recording.

In terms of integration with other systems, the dLive system is capable – thanks to its Dante card – of sending up to 128 audio channels and receiving another 128kHz at 96kHz. These channels arrive at a Yamaha network switch specially enabled to work with Dante, programmed by Area Suena with two V-nets, in order to have redundancy throughout the Dante network. This switch distributes the signals to other elements, such as the aforementioned Pro Tools HDX recording system and to the Allen & Heath SQ-5 mixing console that receives and manages the audio that is received in the Blue Room the main auditorium.

‘This project set some very demanding goals in achieving the highest standards of audio excellence required for the production and recording of classical music,’ says Scope Producciones’ Ángel Colomé, Head of Sound at the Auditorium. ‘That was one of the reasons for opting for the new Allen & Heath Prime input cards, which have preamps of simply extraordinary quality – and I believe we’re pioneers in Spain in this regard. The dLive system also allows us to be futureproof, given its expansion possibilities.

‘The quality/price ratio of the Allen & Heath systems is by far the most impressive in the industry today. And the possibilities for future expansion and compatibility with practically all professional audio formats made it the perfect choice for the Juan March Foundation Auditorium,’ he adds.