Veteran PVRIS Front of House Engineer and Production Manager Connor Hawkins selected the Allen & Heath dLive Digital Mixing System to support the band on the road after an extensive series of trials with consoles from multiple manufacturers.
Hawkins said: “With only 2 or 3 days rehearsal I was able to get fully up and running and comfortable with dLive. It reminds me of the stuff that I like about other desks, but somehow it is even better. One of the huge dLive ‘wins’ is the flexibility of putting anything anywhere at any time. It was easy to move right in and do what I needed to do.”
Commenting on his favorite Allen & Heath dLive feature, Hawkins added: “I’ve also always been a huge advocate of virtual sound check, and it’s just so easy on the dLive compared to other desks. It’s so smooth to jump to the I/O and click from stage to virtual that I’ve really gotten cozy with the virtual check flow. Funny enough, the band doesn’t typically sound check anymore, they often come out in the evening and do the show and trust that we’ve got everything dialed in.”
The first series of PVRIS Allen & Heath dLive shows utilized a 28-fader S5000 Control Surface, but Hawkins eventually scaled down and selected the more compact 12-fader C1500. He recalled: “We tried out a number of things on tour and it was mind-blowing how powerful and compact the Allen & Heath C1500 was. It gave us the processing power and inputs/outputs we need in such a small package.”
Paired with an Allen & Heath DM64 MixRack, the system provides 128 input channels and 64 mix outputs with full processing, all accessible via a rack-mountable control surface sporting a 12” capacitive touchscreen. Powered by the Allen & Heath XCVI processing core, all dLive Digital Mixing System configurations operate at 96kHz with variable bit-depth and a 96-bit accumulator for pristine audio quality and virtually infinite mix headroom.
Hawkins noted: “I’ve been wanting to mix in 96kHz for a long time. Now right out of the box I’m there. Every input I want, with my 55 channels and 2 drum kits and all of this crazy stuff going on—and no problems at all.” He added: “With other consoles, I also felt like I had to add complexity with plugins and calculate and compensate for latency, but this has been great right out of the box. It’s very intuitive, very straightforward. The other desks I considered would have required me to completely rethink the way I mix. Ultimately, I realized I’d just have a better time on the dLive.”
