Billed as Switzerland’s first open-air streaming festival, SummAIR took place in June with a tight programme of live bands mixed on an Allen & Heath dLive set-up.
SummAIR took place in the town of Hochdorf, where an online crowd joined a small, socially-distanced live audience to enjoy performances by prominent home-grown artists, including Veronica Fusaro, ZiBBZ and Marc Amacher.
With five bands performing on a single stage and just a few minutes for each changeover, the challenge for Simon Münger from MSL Eventtechnik was to provide a high-quality, unbroken livestream mix throughout the evening. Reinforcing his own Allen & Heath inventory with a pair of dLive systems hired in through the dLive Rental Network, he devised an integrated mixing system spanning FOH, monitors, livestream and mastering matrix duties.
Münger mixed monitors from an S5000 Surface and DM48 MixRack, setting the gain structure for the whole system. Another S5000 and DM48 pairing at FOH was supplemented by an eight-fader IP8 remote controller, allowing FOH engineer, Tim Werner to access presenter channels and master levels when guest engineers were mixing on the main SurfAce.
Oliver Deiss managed the livestream mix, adding final compression and level adjustments from a third S5000, together with a CDM32 MixRack. Oliver Herzog took care of the mastering matrix using a 19-inch C1500 Surface and CDM32, adding ambient mics and handling transitions between presenters, video playback and the live mix. The FOH and monitor mixers were connected over gigaAce, with Waves3 cards allowing sharing of individual channels between the monitor and livestream set-ups. Four portable DX168 I/O expanders were installed on the bands’ drum risers to facilitate the rapid changeovers between artists, allowing the crew to feed all the mixers by plugging in a single Cat cable. A fifth DX168 was used for additional I/O between the livestream mix and the mastering matrix.
Latency was another concern: ‘The artists were performing in front of a videowall, so there was no room for unwanted delay on the audio and video signals,’ Münger explains. ‘The speed of the dLive system was brilliant. Being able to send all 128 channels without unnecessary AD/DA conversion, and keeping latency under 0.7ms from input to output was a great benefit. The routing is fantastic; it doesn’t matter how many groups you’re using, it doesn’t add any latency.’
Thanks to careful planning and an excellent crew on the ground, SummAIR 2020 went without a hitch, as Münger confirms: ‘I am proud of the way the whole crew pulled together to overcome all the challenges. At every dLive position, our focus was always to have the best possible livestream, and I’m happy we achieved that.’
More: www.allen-heath.com
