Prior to the original and groundbreaking dLive, Allen & Heath focussed mainly on houses of worship and regional rental houses. Since its release, the brand has become prominent in the live market, featuring on major productions including the likes of Billie Eilish, Bring Me The Horizon, Sam Fender and Lewis Capaldi, as well as some the world’s biggest festivals including Reading & Leeds and Coachella. dLive, in many ways, has redefined and elevated the Allen & Heath brand. After extensive development, testing and innovative upgrades, the company recently launched its V2 firmware and new RackUltraFX to provide even more solutions to its growing user base.
“We’re in a very different position to the one we were in 10 years ago,” stated Allen & Heath Director of Product, Nic Beretta. “We have released nine major firmware updates since the first release of dLive before bringing V2 to market,” he added. “We used every customer touchpoint at our disposal, as well as our global distribution network, to acknowledge requests, ideas and suggestions, all of which was fed into our R&D team.”
V2 brings the ‘next generation of effects processing’ and ‘extensive workflow enhancements’ to Allen & Heath users. Major changes include an overhaul of its Cue List system, simplifying the process with manual and auto renumbering options alongside custom MIDI recalls designed for the fast-moving live environment. While the Actions feature makes complex automation easy, enabling functions across multiple channels.
“I’m proud of the Actions feature,” added Allen & Heath Head of Applications Software, Anthony Evans. “We have studied engineers show files and workflows for complex live shows. Actions are our single button solution to many of these workflow complexities. Actions can be used to bypass plug-in servers, change multiple talkback configurations, completely reconstruct surface layouts or even multiple channel gain stages – at the touch of a button.”
The RackUltra FX card uses a combination of a custom FPGA FX core with ARM processing, allowing the company to push the envelope with new algorithms. “Its power is unprecedented,” said Evans. “We can now deploy integrated, low-latency effects that were previously unimaginable in a live console, opening up dLive to the next generation of onboard processing.”
Notable effects that are now ‘in-box’ for the dLive include a Vocal Tuner, Quad Voice and Auto Key Harmoniser, Saturation, Amp/cabinet modelling and two new reverbs utilising the full power of the RackUltra FX card – all of which bring a new level of realism to in-console reverberation, according to its developers.
“The amount of pure processing has enabled much richer and complex reverbs. Spaces Reverb Designer is an algorithmic reverb exploiting three different reverberation engines capable of detail, ultra-realistic and natural sounding spaces. The Plate Reverb Designer, replicates 11 true plates, including classic emulations, models of vintage plates and new models, creating a next level in intelligible vocal reverb,” stated Evans.
“We are in a unique position in offering a very streamlined workflow without the need for engineers to carry a lot of gear to their show,” said Beretta. “There’s many cases when a live sound engineer doubles as a studio engineer. When they go out on the road, they are using numerous plug-ins with a great deal of automation on their show file, with timecode and triggers for processing and to drive autotune. We created these tools to go beyond what they are asking for, enabling them to provide a unique offering. I am particularly pleased with engineers’ feedback on our saturation, vocal and reverb processing. They have been favourably compared with the best industry plug-ins,” commented Beretta.
The duo stated that several engineers took on the V2 midway through a tour with several more opting for the system for their latest production rehearsals. “Jared Daly who looks after Bring Me The Horizon has now moved over to V2 and has stated that it has changed the way he mixes. He can now do certain things at the push of a button,” Beretta revealed.
Words: Stew Hume
Photos: Allen & Heath
