Event company Moon Mother Productions (MMP), based in Melbourne, Australia, utilized Allen & Heath for the recent Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race, deploying a several Qu, SQ and dLive mix systems to provide live and broadcast feeds across a number of sites and locations.
Set in the iconic surf town of Torquay and hosted by the 2011 Tour de France winner Cadel Evans, the four-day event consists of multiple bike races that sees some of the world’s fastest cyclists compete across miles of scenic coastline.
MMP stocks one of the largest hire inventories of A&H consoles and accessories in Australia, with Tim Dalton, the company’s business development manager at MMP, explaining, “As a very busy and growing audio company we need products that work flawlessly 100 percent of the time. The variety of A&H products at our disposal gives us the flexibility to deploy the appropriate piece of kit for the job in a cost and space effective manner, and with an event such as this where space really is at a minimum, A&H consoles were perfect for the job.”
The huge site combined with complex requirements made it essential to utilize multiple audio systems that could communicate with each other. A dLive system was placed in an isolated cabin in the backstage compound, comprising a dLive S5000 surface for front of house and monitor duties for the main stage, paired with a DM48 MixRack and two DX168s fitted with super MADI I/O cards that fed comms and streaming. This configuration was also used to link to four other systems around the site, enabling feeds to be shared between independent setups for live entertainment and commentary, background music, broadcast, AV and live streaming.
Due to the nature of the event, a range of compact mixers were also required for more remote locations, with SQ and Qu systems tapped for this role. An SQ-6 handled audio distribution for the musicians and performers on the entertainment Stage, while another SQ-5 ran audio and commentary at a second audio ops base over at the Torquay start/finish line. Additionally, two Qu-16s supplied stereo and broadcast feeds in the DJ Corner and King of the Mountain (KOM) area.
“We used Allen & Heath products throughout and didn’t even consider using another console due to A&H’s easily configurable I/O and internal processing power such as ducking, gating and compression. Matrix mixes were also used extensively across the site, and this was another major factor in choosing A&H consoles,” Dalton concludes. “We’ve been main audio production and stages supplier to this event since its inception six years ago and have just been signed up for another three years.”
