Inviting a virtual audience of self-isolating fans to share a New Orleans Mardi-Gras atmosphere, Swedish band Louisiana Avenue treated then to carnival drummers, whistles, feathers and glitter – and an unseen pair of Allen & Heath dLive mixing systems.

With less than a week to deliver the charity show, A/V rental company Scenteknik AVL took on all technical aspects of the performance, which was staged at the historic Cirkus arena in Stockholm. Scenteknik chose a dLive S5000 Surface and DM48 MixRack for the livestream mix and another S5000 coupled with a DM64 for 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 main S5000 for multitrack recording and virtual soundcheck.

‘It was a challenging show to mix for many reasons,’ says Scenteknik Head of Audio and engineer for the event, Gustaf Kempe. ‘Since there wasn’t an audience in the theatre, we didn’t have to worry about a PA system, but we needed decent side fill so the band would get a live feeling.

‘They also had a sign language interpreter 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 LR 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.’

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