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Allen & Heath Provides Backbone For System Supporting Open-Air Streaming Festival In Switzerland

Event with five live performances supported by an integrated mix/routing system spanning FOH, monitors, livestream and mastering matrix duties.
ProSoundWeb Allen % Heath
The view from the dLive S5000 on monitors at the SummAIR festival.

Billed as Switzerland’s first open-air streaming festival, the recent SummAIR presented a tight program of live bands mixed with an Allen & Heath dLive digital mix system.

SummAIR was held in mid-June in the town of Hochdorf, where a small, socially distanced audience was joined by an online crowd to enjoy five performances by homegrown artists that included Veronica Fusaro, ZiBBZ and Marc Amacher.

With five bands performing on a single stage and just a few minutes for each changeover, the key challenge for Simon Münger of sound provider MSL Eventtechnik GmbH 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, Münger devised an integrated system spanning FOH, monitors, livestream and mastering matrix duties.

He mixed monitors with 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. Meanwhile, 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 setups.

Simon Münger with the dLive systems prepped before the SummAIR festival.

Four portable DX168 I/O expanders were deployed on drum risers to facilitate 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 big consideration, as Münger explains, “The artists were performing in front of a videowall, so there was no room for unwanted delay on the audio and video signals. The speed of the dLive system was brilliant. Being able to send all 128 channels without unnecessary AD/DA conversion and latency of under 0.7 milliseconds 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.”

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