Soundcheck Celebrates the Holidays with Allen & Heath

Soundcheck Nashville combined its 2019 Holiday Celebration with a charity drive, collecting over 700 toys and bikes for needy children in the Nashville area. The well-known Music City services provider opened two of its studios for food and dancing with music provided by the Soundcheck House Band and by Sixwire, an American country music group. The event’s audio featured Allen & Heath dLive Digital Mixing Systems at both FOH and monitors. In-house audio engineer Caleb Rose described his experience with the dLive systems at the event.

“Before working at Soundcheck, the only experience I had with Allen & Heath was with their older analog desks,” Rose said. “But, after spending less than an hour with the dLive, I felt right at home. Unlike other digital desks, the dLive is very approachable and easy to understand. Every setting and feature is, at most, two button presses away, a vital key to why these consoles are so easy and fast to operate.”

At FOH, Soundcheck used a dLive C3500 Surface with CDM48 MixRack. “I placed the FOH MixRack offstage next to the monitor position giving me a super clean and uncluttered FOH setup,” said Rose. At monitors, Soundcheck used an S5000 Surface with DM48 MixRack. Allen & Heath’s gigaACE network made the connections and Rose adds, “The CAT6 cabling was a lifesaver as we had a short time to setup and tear down the system to coordinate with our normal rehearsal schedule. Also, because gigaACE can handle bi-directional digital audio, I had a lot of flexibility to patch anything I needed from FOH.”

Sixwire’s appearance included guests John Elefante and Derek St. Holmes and Rose notes, “I was able to drag their inputs onto the Surface without pause or stress and I added FX to their mix to give the guest singers a more identifiable sound. The dLive made this a breeze.” Overall, the Soundcheck system had over 40 inputs, 14 outputs, and more than 10 FX units running simultaneously and Rose says, “There wasn’t any noticeable slowdown or lag. With all the flexibility, power, and the ease of use of these consoles, you would be hard pressed to find a situation they couldn’t accommodate.”

Rose commented, “Half of the job of an engineer is the ability to adapt to changes and make them sound good. This desk does a lot of that work for you. It makes it super easy to make changes on the fly without worry of processing hang ups or pauses in the audio output.”