The recent Eleftheros tour of stadiums and theatres across Greece by top-selling Greek artist Konstantinos Argyros, culminating in a support slot for 50 Cent at Olympic Stadium in Athens, the country’s largest live music event of the year, saw Allen & Heath digital mix systems deployed for both front of house and monitors.
“When we were designing the tour, Allen & Heath was our first and only choice for this demanding production,” says Andreas Matrakos, audio specialist at Athens-based rental firm dbi AV Industry. “We needed a system that could go everywhere, could be set up in minutes and provide top-quality sound.”
A 64-channel Avantis mixer, fitted with a Dante card, was the preferred option for front of house engineer Ilias Lakkas, who was able to acclimate to a system that was new to him before the tour. “I could easily use the console within a couple of hours,” he says. “Avantis has an easy-to-use interface with clear visual feedback, an extremely fast operating system and great sounding FX. I really loved the integrated De-Esser which I used a lot on the vocals.”
Over in monitor world, a 28-fader dLive S5000 surface was combined with a 128-channel DM48 MixRack fitted with Dante and gigaACE cards. “The size of the S5000 and the customizable interface gave me the ability to adjust the console according to my workflow,” says monitor engineer Alexandros Kyrlis. “It’s easy and fast to program a mix for a live act and the sound quality is just awesome, I was very impressed with the clarity and the powerful sound.”
The digital split between systems was facilitated by the gigaACE card in the DM48 MixRack connecting to the integrated SLink port on the Avantis, providing an low transport latency stated as 52µs (microseconds) between systems.
In addition to the wedges and sidefills, 10 Allen & Heath ME-1 personal mixers were employed onstage for musicians to craft their mixes. “Our experience with the ME-1 can only be described as awesome,” says musician Nikos Giouletzis, violinist in Argyros’ backing band. “The ability to easily handle so many channels to shape our mix as we desire just blew us away and the sound quality exceeded all expectations!”
