The current tour by Latin Grammy award-winning singer/songwriter Carla Morrison sees California-based audio engineer Jerry Lopez delivering both front of house and monitor mixes with an Allen & Heath dLive CTi1500 control surface joined by supporting components.
“Thanks to dLive’s MCA feature, I am able to run both front of house and monitors for Carla with my compact CTi1500 control surface” explains Lopez. “I simply set up spills so that I can minimize the amount of faders required on my top layer.”
Lopez also brings along a DM0 dLive Mixrack, which handles the system’s 128-channel 96 kHz FPGA processing and four DX168s stageboxes for distributed I/O across the stage. “The first stagebox is for drums,” Lopez says. “I use a second one for in-ears, and another for wireless.” The DX stageboxes each provide 16 dLive mic preamps and eight line outputs in a portable form factor and can also be mounted in a standard 19-inch rack.
He adds that he makes full use of dLive’s DEEP emulations: “I use preamp models for warmth and coloration on every single mic channel. I also use the OptTronik compressor on every channel.” For the main mix, he’s employing the new Bus Compressor that was added in dLive Firmware V1.9.
Lopez also has a 128-channel 96 kHz Waves module used solely for multitracking and Virtual Soundcheck. “I see no need to complicate things with an external plugin server,” he notes. “With all the dLive processing available to me. I prefer having things compact. I can set everything up quickly and have fun mixing without needing a whole crew.”
Lopez, who has been a dLive user since 2015, also runs a rental and production house with several of the mix systems called Jerry Rig Audio & Creative Solutions. “I own eight dLive systems,” he concludes. “Allen & Heath really does things right in terms of constantly updating with new features.”
