With the COVID-19 pandemic putting a halt to touring weeks after their latest album release, Suddenly, Canadian composer and musician, Dan Snaith returned to the road in November 2021 with a string of dates across North America, Europe and the UK as a four-piece live act, accompanied by FOH Engineer, Christos Gogos.
The requirements for the live show included the ability to run FOH and IEMs from a single console and, critically, that the console was small enough to travel with the band. “When we decided with the band to take our own desk on tour, my first choice was the [Allen & Heath] dLive C1500 because we wanted a desk that can fly anywhere with us” Gogos said.
The dLive C1500 Surface provides 12 faders over six layers to provide 72 fader strips in addition to 19 assignable SoftKeys and a 12” touchscreen, all in a form factor that is small enough to mount in a 19” rack – or in the hold of a plane. With the 4-piece band requiring 30 inputs onstage, Gogos partnered the C1500 with a CDM32 MixRack, offering 32 mic/line inputs and 16 line outputs in a 5U frame, powered by Allen & Heath’s 96kHz XCVI FPGA engine, capable of 160×64 processing channels with ultra-low 0.7ms latency.
“I’ve used many different digital desks in the past, but when I first mixed on a dLive system I fell in love with the way that it sounded” added Gogos. “It’s really easy to set up and navigate around the desk. The compressors, FX units, dynamic EQ’s are great and I’m using the Dyn8 [multiband compressor and dynamic EQ] on almost every channel. It is small but mighty, I love it!”