Allen & Heath takes the sound of the Juan March Foundation auditorium to a new level

The digital audio mixing system has been replaced by a state-of-the-art solution from this manufacturer, based on dLive and SQ models.

Located on Calle Castelló in Madrid, the Auditorium of the Juan March Foundation has been characterized since 1975 for its live musical offer, generally classical, and always for free.

Last year the need to renew audio and video mixing and recording systems was raised, as well as signal flow management, so that these were at the height of the productions and were in accordance with current technologies.

The Juan March Foundation has long trusted the company's staff Scope for the technical operation of the auditorium, and who have worked with the integrator Area Sounds to carry out the engineering project and the renewal of systems, which he finally made at the beginning of 2020.

specifically, the digital audio mixing system has been replaced by a state-of-the-art solution from the manufacturer Allen & Heath, based on dLive and SQ systems.

The needs demanded the implementation of a high-quality digital audio mixing system for live that could be easily integrated with a Pro Tools HDX platform., since the concerts offered by the March Foundation, usually, are recorded in audio and video for editing and later use, as well as transmission in streaming.

Another challenge was for both audio and video signals to be sent to an annex space – the Blue Room., that allows those spectators who have been left without a seat in the main auditorium when it is full to follow the concerts on a cinema screen. They can also follow from other areas, like the cafeteria, thanks to the open architecture of the system.

Raised these needs, the new audio mixing system had to be powerful, flexible, modular and capable of easily integrating with other platforms (ProTools, in this case), and Allen systems & Heath dLive more than met these requirements.

That's why, Area Suena contacted the specialists of Audio-Technica Iberia (Allen's exclusive importer & Heath for Spain) in order to jointly design the configuration of a system that would fit the needs of the auditorium.

Configuration and installation

The solution is composed of several blocks, some placed in the control room of the auditorium (an enclosed space at the end of the seating area, in front of the stage) and others located in a technical room next to the stage.

In the control room is an Allen control surface & Heath dLive S5000 and a processing rack, inputs and outputs DM48, equipped with a card Dante 128×128 and another AES EBU, plus redundant power supplies.

In the technical room there are two racks of remote inputs and outputs DX32, connected by redundant network cable to the DM48. One of the racks is equipped with 32 analog input channels; sixteen of them on two cards Prime (eight channels each, with study quality) and two standard pre-cards (also with eight channels each).

The second DX32 rack is equipped with three standard input cards (twenty-four channels) and an analog output card (eight channels). with 56 remote analog input channels, that are added to the 48 DM48 rack channels and 8 of the S5000 surface itself, located in the control, adding a total of 112 analog inputs always available for routing, live mixing and recording.

Integration with other platforms

Thanks to your Dante card, the dLive system is capable of sending up to 128 audio channels and receive others 128, to 96 Khz. These channels reach a Yamaha network switch, specially enabled to work with Dante, and programmed by Area Suena with two V-nets to have redundancy throughout the network.

This switch distributes the signals to other elements, such as the aforementioned ProTools HDX recording system and, which is more important, to the Allen mixer & Heath SQ-5 (also equipped with a Dante card), that receives and manages the audio that is received in the Blue Room from the main auditorium.

For this project, a powerful video recording system from Blackmagic Design and an Antelope Trinity master watch have also been installed., which refers to all the elements of this installation.

As Ángel Colomé has pointed out, sound manager of the auditorium of the company Scope, has stated that in this project " has opted for the new Allen entry cards & Heath Prime, with previous quality simply extraordinary, being pioneers in Spain in this sense. This system will allow to face with guarantees the coming years, given its possibilities of expansion".

By Area Suena, José Afuera pointed out that "the quality/price ratio of Allen systems & Heath is, by far, the most favorable in the industry today", in addition to positively assessing "the possibilities of expansion and compatibility with practically all professional audio formats".

Alex Blanco has also worked on the conception of the audio system, Allen brand manager & Heath for Spain, and Gabriel Albornoz, Pro Audio manager of Audio-Technica Iberia, together with Marcos Montero, Arturo Sanz and Jose Outside Area Suena.