The BeachLife Ranch Festival in Los Angeles is focused on Country and Americana music, hosting headline artists such as The Lumineers, Hall and Oates, Brandi Carlile, and Wilco. For performances at the Four Sixes Speakeasy stage, two Allen & Heath digital consoles were implemented: a Qu Series mixer at front of house, along with a 64-channel Avantis for multitrack recording and broadcast to Volume.com’s live music streaming platform.
The Avantis was paired with a GX4816 stagebox, which provided 48 remote mic preamps to receive audio via a split snake. The console also housed a 128-channel 96kHz Waves module – allowing for external processing and simple multitrack recording. “The Avantis was awesome,” noted Justin Corser, audio engineer and Program Director for Volume.com. “We had some staff at the festival who were still new to digital consoles, and it was really easy to get them started on Avantis. It’s like the console does the mixing for you.”
For streaming services like Volume.com, compression is crucial – since users will be listening on a variety of devices. “The Avantis’ Bus compressor was really clean,” noted Chris Austin, audio engineer and Business Development Manager for Volume.com. “The preamp models that add harmonics were also really cool for adding color and saturation to certain channels.”
Austin also remarked on how useful the Avantis’ Virtual Soundcheck function was in a festival scenario. “At festivals, you generally only get a few minutes to set up your mix. Using Virtual Soundcheck, it’s a single keypress to toggle between a live source and DAW playback from a previously recorded session. That gave us the time we needed to really fine tune things and get the compression right.”
“Volume continues to raise the bar with amazing live and streamed events,” added Jeff Hawley, Marketing Director, Allen & Heath USA. “It’s been great to watch Chris and the team as they have grown and expanded with Allen & Heath consoles in the mix for various productions. I look forward to seeing where they go next!”
Austin and Corser plan on using Avantis for more and more Volume.com streaming events in the future. “It’s such a versatile console,” noted Corser. “I can easily see myself using it at any festival main stage without issue. It’s really easy for beginners, but also has enough depth for the most seasoned touring engineer to dive in and make use of all the complex functionality.”