The production of Kuweni the Musical by Charitha Attalage in Sri Lanka has completed five sold-out shows over four days at the Nelum Pokuna Mahinda Rajapaksha Theatre. A multi-sensory experience uniting a diverse assembly of composers, musicians, visual artists and songwriters in a unique immersive performance, the musical used an Allen & Heath dLive mixing system – the first in Sri Lanka.

Allen & Heath played a pivotal role in bringing the production to life, with the equipment line-up including a dLive S7000 Surface, two DM64 MixRacks, four DX168 expanders, and three networking cards (gigaAce, Waves V3, and Dante 128x128).

Handling both FOH and monitors on the dLive S7000 was Universal Sound Productions audio engineer and founder, Malinda Lowe who orchestrated a complex set-up of 128 inputs and 64 outputs for the show’s 90-minute duration.

‘As a sound engineer, I travel around the world for work, and I get to used different types of boards every time,’ Lowe says. ‘Last year I wanted to try the dLive on our Australia tour, and I loved the ecosystem and the workflow of the board. When we were planning for the Kuweni the Musical concert, I knew the consoles I owned at the time were not going to meet this kind of complex requirement. I had many challenges to overcome with the music director’s requirements, so I decided to invest in a dLive system to fulfil all my technical demands.

‘I managed all the in-ear mixes from FOH and programmed the 15 song scenes with in-ear send levels, FX and EQ changes during our three-day rehearsals,’ he continues. ‘The musicians were happy with the sound, and the DYN8 processor played a major role in every bus output by controlling the frequency response dynamically on IEMs since the song arrangements had a lot of dynamic variations with so many percussions.’

One of the highlights of the production was the integration of 112 open microphones, various line instruments, and an eight-channel stem playback session via Dante – with the entire set-up controlled through the Allen & Heath ecosystem.

The dLive system’s software and hardware also enabled Lowe to navigate the demands of the production with ease, with the engineer using Virtual Soundcheck mode to fine-tune the house and IEM mixes and saving them to scenes accordingly during the rehearsals.

‘I have used some of these features in my other consoles,’ he says. ‘But the dLive I/O integration and workflow were seamless. It’s just a matter of assigning a SoftKey to switch the console features.’

In addition to the stem playback session, there was a common Cue track and dedicated cues for drums, percussion and strings sections of IEMs; the click track and time code also ran via Dante.

The workflow was very easy thanks to the dLive software ecosystem.’ Lowe says. ‘During all ten days of production we didn’t have a single glitch on the rig. It was super smooth and sounded very natural, with a good dynamic range that suited the many fusion drum acts we had.’

For channel processing, Lowe primarily relied on the onboard Deep processing, including the OptTronik compressor for vocals, the 16VU compressor on drums and 16T on percussion, with the Bus compressor on Mains and Groups. The Dyn8 processor, Lowe’s personal favourite, was also used on vocals and many other channels.

‘The main reason for me using onboard processing was the incredible emulation characteristics of the integrated processors, just like the original hardware,’ he explains. ‘Even though I had third-party apps like Waves and UAD for hybrid processing, my focus was to keep all my inputs with no latency or phase coherency issues. The DSP power of the dLive was amazing as I was running a lot of processing, and the console handled it all seamlessly at 96kHz.’

Allen & Heath’s DX168 expanders played a role in simplifying the complex configuration of 32 live musicians on stage. The plug-and-play design of the units allowed them to be configured in cascade mode to meet the 32x32 input requirement, reducing cabling and enhancing efficiency.

‘The DX168s were instrumental in streamlining the set-up for the extensive number of musicians on stage,’ Lowe says. ‘With all 128 Inputs, Fader bank customisation helped to configure the surface according to my needs and gave me full control over the house and IEM mixes throughout the show. The intuitive control and versatile capabilities of the dLive system were a game-changer.’

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