Allen & Heath brings its dLive system to Jacob Collier's world tour

A dual dLive system of Allen & Heath is one of the central elements of the 'Djesse' world tour’ by British singer-songwriter Jacob Collier this year.

With performances in Europe, America, Asia and Australia, the tour Djesse of Jacob Collier, accompanied by a band of six musicians, offers a different show in each of them, where improvisation and public participation, together with audio technology and interactive lighting set the tone.

As he points out Ben Bloomberg, production manager and show systems designer, "Gone are the days when you could get there and use any table.; this tour has too many moving parts. With a Looping advanced and music as dynamic as Jacob's, our engineers act almost as much as the band. The mix is very dynamic and the show changes every night, with an important improvisation".

After testing the flagship digital platform of Allen & Heath before the pandemic, Bloomberg turned to the sound provider Eighth Day Sound Systems (which was acquired by Clair Global) to supply you with a couple of systems dLive to handle FOH and monitors, since "it is the only solution that provides the required I/O and the number of channels in a factor that facilitates the freedom of production", Ensures.

How show files are supported across Allen's dLive range & Heath, brand that markets Audio-Technica, has the same FPGA kernel as 128 channels and 96kHz on all MixRacks, Bloomberg and his team were able to switch between different surface and MixRack combinations for each stage of the tour without losing processing power or the number of channels..

specifically, for the stage in the United States a couple of S5000 surfaces of 28 faders with a MixRack DM0 and DM64; in the UK, one of the S5000 surfaces was replaced by a S7000 of 36 faders on monitors; and for upcoming events in Australia, a couple of surfaces C1500 ultra compact will be deployed with a pair of MixRacks DM0 and three expanders DX168 for analog I/O.

"I love the flexibility offered by the dLive series., that allows me to travel with my equipment without having to compromise on the processing power I need for the show. Jose Ortega, FOH Engineer-. The sound quality of the console makes it easy to get great sound and consistency in my mixes, so I don't have to think about plugins or external equipment and that's great when you're on tour.".

The show uses 116 audio channels from a combination of analogue and digital sources, making use of dLive Dante cards for connection to redundant playback systems, in addition to the integration of the graphical interface with the wireless systems of Shure.

"Linking our devices Axient Digital directly with the channels of the table was a pleasure - explains the monitor engineer Alessandro Melchior-. I'm a big fan of having everything under control at my desk., without having to rely too much on external hardware".

To do this, Melchior relies on the suite of tools from DEEP processing dLive zero latency for artist monitor mixes. "Its enormous amount of processing power and well-distributed surface area make managing this show a pleasure.. Functions such as Dyn8, Source Expander and Bus Compressor make a difference when I keep 116 clean and controlled channels".

The dLive platform "has become a fundamental creative tool for Jacob and our entire team," adds Bloomberg.. Not only does it offer a powerful feature set and great ergonomics., but it's also a lot of fun to mix with it.. The effects sound great and there are many sound modeling tools that used to require dedicated external equipment.".

Other articles on allen-heath, Audio-Technica, Clair Global, Eighth Day Sound Systems, Jacob Collier, Shure