"We had these two official venues using Allen & Heath consoles plus a dozen more unofficial South By Southwest venues using a variety of Allen & Heath mixers," states Michael Palmer VP of North American sales for Allen & Heath.
For the British Embassy series there was the challenge of lack of sound checks, plus the need to send the audio signal to the BBC and UK talk shows hosting remote interviews live.
"We had an Allen & Heath GLD-112 with the latest v1.4 firmware freshly installed at FOH position. Plus, we used an AR2412 and two AR84 remote I/O racks to give us a total of 44 microphone inputs and 24 microphone outputs," Palmer adds.
At monitor position an Allen & Heath GLD-80 with an AR2412 and AR84 being used to control Tannoy iQ Live series monitor wedges.
Now in its seventh year at the festival, the British Embassy hosted the BBC's first ever showcase radio show live from Austin, Texas. To handle the challenge, the GLD-112 was running WAVES sound grid with a Dante Card split, during the Thursday live web streaming Talk Show, a Focusrite Rednet 6 was used to connect the Dante stream to a MADI signal.
Over at the Dell Computer Fader Fort was Brett Orrrison, veteran FOH Engineer for Austin's own The Black Angels. All of the live inputs were being run from a remote trailer 400ft from the stage via live streaming with an Allen & Heath iLive-T112 control surface and iDR-64 MixRack running WAVES sound grid.
Michael Palmer points out, "The iLive system's unique design allowed us to do this very remote set up with only one Cat 5 cable instead of multiple heavy cables, for which there was no room. The system ran flawlessly for five days in rain, heat and snow."
(Jim Evans)
