Mexican pop act RBD recently embarked on a reunion tour across the US, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia, playing stadia and arenas in 26 cities. The 54-show tour kicked off at the Sun Bowl stadium in El Paso in August, and will take in Madison Square Garden in New York and the Olympic Stadium in Rio de Janeiro.
With an analogue split being used between the FOH and monitor systems, Miguel Tapia, FOH engineer and Senior Consultant for Mexican distributor Representaciones de Audio, had free rein when it came to choosing a mixing platform for the FOH mix, and opted for a dLive system, supplied by Clair Global.
Based around a DM64 MixRack and an S7000 Surface, the 64 XLR inputs and 32 XLR outputs for the DM64 act as the heart of the system, providing 128 input channels and 64 mix outputs coupled with a configurable 64-bus architecture, plus 0.7ms latency and phase-aligned signal paths. The 36-fader S7000 is the largest Surface in the dLive range and has a pair of 12-inch touchscreens with configurable SoftKeys and rotary controls to customise mixing workflow.
To meet the 71 input requirement for the production, and with the analogue split, Tapia expanded the system with two DX32 modular I/O, between them housing four Prime input cards and two Prime output cards to offer a total of 32 preamps and 16 outputs in addition to the 64 inputs and 32 outputs supported by the DM64. The remaining slots in the DX32 were populated with AES input and output cards to interface with a Cedar DNS8 noise reduction processor, and a Waves card for multitrack recording and playback.
Tapia used Prime on the five lead and two backing vocalists but was also afforded the luxury of deploying Prime for other high dynamic range sources such as guitar, bass and drums. He used the remaining Prime I/O to interface with his Neve Portico II Master Buss Processor as well as providing high-quality analogue feeds to the PA. ‘The Prime preamps are just fantastic,’ he says. ‘They deliver great headroom, a low noise floor and, most importantly, a great sound.’
Once the signal enters the digital domain, Tapia relies on dLive’s emulations of classic hardware and Dyn8 engine for his signal processing. ‘I absolutely love the native dLive processing, I think I use just about everything,’ he says. ‘I really like the Mighty compressor on snare and kit subgroup, and I also like the Dual Threshold Expander on drums. I use a lot of Dyn8 (multiband compressor and dynamic EQ), the transient controllers, the de-esser...’
‘The dLive system has been fantastic so far, especially the Prime Input Cards and Outputs,’ he adds. ‘The dLive system is super robust and delivers a big, clear sound, making every show a memorable experience.’
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