California Vibrations (Cali Vibes), a recent three-day celebration of raggae music and culture attended by more than 60,000 at Marina Green Park in Long Beach, CA, was supported by full-service event company Smoke and Mirrors Productions, which deployed an Allen & Heath dLive C1500 compact mix system at the heart of its sound reinforcement approach.
The rack-mountable C1500 paired with a DM48 MixRack to provide 48 mic/line inputs, 24 line outputs and access to the XCVI 160×64 FPGA core. Festival interface and audio split was delivered by a trio of network audio cards — Dante, Waves and MADI. With 128 channels of bidirectional audio at 96 kHz, the Dante and Waves cards offered low latency, high channel count connectivity to their respective networks and devices using standard networking cabling and hardware.
Further, the superMADI audio networking card provided coaxial and optical format options up to 128 I/O at 96 kHz each, with redundancy and sample rate switchable per link pair and a choice of Smux or HighSpeed 96 kHz mode.
“We had two engineers who had never been on the dLive console before,” notes Smoke and Mirrors CEO and sound engineer Sean Lyons. “Within 10 minutes they were mixing the show and getting around with ease. The dLive layout and labeling and the outstanding sound quality and flexible networking make this console a keeper.”
Allen & Heath USA marketing director Jeff Hawley adds, “The C1500 and its even more lightweight titanium CTi1500 stablemate have been showing up at more and more festivals lately for sure. I think Sean hit on just why this trend is happening. In many cases the top need for festival mixing applications is ease of use and something that engineers can easily walk up to and quickly get a great mix on without lots of hassle. dLive is a true digital native and draws on the familiarity with smartphones and tablets that we all use without thinking. The Harmony UI and a highly responsive touchscreen feels familiar and pairs with just the right amount of faders and rotaries and SoftKeys to get the job done. We’re proud to see the little C1500 at the helm of festivals of all sizes.”
