Konstantinos Argyros recently concluded his Eleftheros tour of stadiums and theatres across Greece, culminating in a support slot for 50 Cent at Athens’ Olympic Stadium – what is considered Greece’s largest live music event of the year, with Allen & Heath mixers handling FOH and monitor duties.
“When we were designing the tour, Allen & Heath was our first and only choice for this demanding production,” said Andreas Matrakos, Audio Specialist at Athens-based rental firm dbi AV Industry. “We needed a system that could go everywhere, could be set up in minutes and provide top-quality sound.”
A 64-channel Avantis mixer, fitted with a Dante card, was the preferred option for FOH with engineer Ilias Lakkas quickly acclimatising to a system that was new to him before the tour. “I could easily use the console within a couple of hours,” he said. “Avantis has an easy-to-use interface with clear visual feedback, an extremely fast operating system and great sounding FX. I really loved the integrated De-Esser which I used a lot on the vocals.”
Over in monitor world, a 28-fader dLive S5000 Surface was combined with a 128-channel DM48 MixRack fitted with Dante and gigaACE cards. “The size of the S5000 and the customisable interface gave me the ability to adjust the console according to my workflow,” says monitor engineer Alexandros Kyrlis. “It’s easy and fast to program a mix for a live act and the sound quality is just awesome, I was very impressed with the clarity and the powerful sound.”
The digital split between systems was facilitated by the gigaACE card in the DM48 MixRack connecting to the integrated SLink port on the Avantis, providing an ultra-low transport latency of 52µs (microseconds) between systems.
In addition to the wedges and side-fills, 10 of Allen & Heath ME-1 Personal Mixers were deployed onstage for musicians to craft their mixes with precise control over up to 40 inputs. “Our experience with the ME-1 can only be described as awesome,” said Nikos Giouletzis, violinist in Argyros’ backing band. “The ability to easily handle so many channels to shape our mix as we desire just blew us away and the sound quality exceeded all expectations!”