A national tour by Grammy Award-winning Christian artists Bryan and Katie Torwalt saw mix engineer Rob Drayton employing an Allen & Heath dLive CTi1500 surface and DM48 MixRack to handle both front of house and monitors. “I need something that has the capacity to do both front of house and monitors, but that I could also load in myself without needing a second person,” he explains.
The 19-inch titanium rack-mountable CTi1500 surface, DM48 and several wireless systems are housed in a single rack case that can easily be transported. “I could roll the whole thing in, pop the cover off, run one cable, and that was it,” Drayton says. “I enjoyed challenging the status quo of larger consoles; this was simple and sounded great.”
The CTi1500 also housed a Dante card that allowed for multitrack recording of every performance as well as virtual soundcheck playback. Drayton notes that, despite all the processing capabilities he had at his fingertips with the 96 kHz dLive FPGA, he didn’t need to tweak the channels very much to get the sound he wanted: “On other desks, there’s so much (channel processing) that I need to do. With dLive, it just sounded quite good as it was.”
The 12-fader CTi1500’s 128-channel, 64-bus dLive mix engine had enough power to double-patch all the inputs internally without needing a separate monitor console. Drayton was first introduced to the dLive series at a trade show a few years ago, and notes “I was like, man… this is cool!” He later got some hands-on experience with the Allen & Heath’s SQ and Avantis series mixers as well.
