A captivating multi-sensory experience uniting a diverse team of composers, musicians, visual artists, songwriters, and more to create an immersive and unique performance, the musical took place over four days with five sold-out shows at the prestigious Nelum Pokuna Mahinda Rajapaksha Theatre.
Allen & Heath’s audio solutions played a pivotal role in bringing the production to life, with the equipment lineup including a dLive S7000 Surface, two DM64 MixRacks, four DX168 expanders, and three networking cards (gigaACE, Waves V3, and Dante 128×128).
Handling both FOH and monitors on the dLive S7000 was accomplished audio engineer and founder of leading rental company Universal Sound Productions, Malinda Lowe. Leveraging the dLive system, Lowe orchestrated a complex setup of 128 inputs and 64 outputs, ensuring impeccable audio quality throughout the show’s 90-minute duration.
“As a sound engineer, I travel around the world for work, and I get to used different types of boards every time,” said Lowe. “Last year I wanted to try the dLive on our Australia tour, and I loved the ecosystem and the workflow of the board. When we were planning for the Kuweni the Musical concert, I knew the consoles I owned at the time were not going to meet this kind of complex requirement. I had many challenges to overcome with the music director’s requirements, so I decided to invest in a dLive system – the first in Sri Lanka – to fulfil all my technical demands.”
The dLive S7000 with DM64 MixRacks met all the requirements to deliver an extraordinary sonic experience according to Lowe. “I managed all the in-ear mixes from FOH and programmed the 15 song scenes with in-ear send levels, FX, and EQ changes during our 3-day rehearsals. The musicians were happy with the sound, and the DYN8 processor played a major role in every bus output by controlling the frequency response dynamically on IEMs since the song arrangements had a lot of dynamic variations with so many percussions.”
One of the highlights of the production was the integration of 112 open microphones, various line instruments, and an eight-channel stem playback session via Dante – with the entire setup effortlessly controlled through the Allen & Heath ecosystem.
The dLive system’s software and hardware harmony also enabled Lowe to navigate the intricate demands of the production with ease, with the engineer utilising Virtual Soundcheck mode to fine-tune the house and IEM mixes and saving them to scenes accordingly during the rehearsals.
“I have used some of these features in my other consoles,” he said. “But the dLive I/O integration and workflow were seamless. It’s just a matter of assigning a SoftKey to switch the console features.”
In addition to the stem playback session, there was a common Cue track and dedicated cues for drums, percussion, and strings sections of IEMs; the click track and time code also ran via Dante. “The workflow was very easy thanks to the dLive software ecosystem.” Lowe commented. “During all ten days of production we didn’t have a single glitch on the rig. It was super smooth and sounded very natural in a good dynamic range with the many fusion drum acts we had.”
For channel processing, Lowe primarily relied on the onboard DEEP processing, including the OptTronik compressor for vocals, the 16VU compressor on drums and 16T on percussion, with the Bus compressor on Mains and Groups. The Dyn8 processor, Lowe’s personal favourite, was also used on vocals and many other channels.
“The main reason for me using onboard processing was the incredible emulation characteristics of the integrated processors, just like the original hardware,” explained Lowe. “Even though I had 3rd-party apps like Waves and UAD for hybrid processing, my focus was to keep all my inputs with no latency or phase coherency issues. The DSP power of the dLive was amazing as I was running a lot of processing, and the console handled it all seamlessly at the 96 kHz sample rate.”
Allen & Heath’s DX168 expanders played a crucial role in simplifying the complex configuration of 32 live musicians on stage. The plug-and-play design of the units allowed for configuring the expanders in cascade mode to meet the 32×32 input requirement, reducing cabling and enhancing efficiency.
Lowe commented further, “The DX168s were instrumental in streamlining the setup for the extensive number of musicians on stage. With all 128 Inputs, Fader bank customization helped to configure the surface according to my needs and gave me full control over the house and IEM mixes throughout the show. The intuitive control and versatile capabilities of the dLive system were a game-changer.”
