Held annually in Grapevine, Texas, this year’s “GrapeFest” attracted over 200,000 visitors who enjoyed great food, art and wine along with music mixed on Allen & Heath dLive S Class Digital Mixing Systems provided by Dallas/Fort Worth based Epicenter Productions.

Epicenter provided sound, video production, lighting, staging, entertainment booking and consulting for all of the stages at GrapeFest. At the “Main Stage”, used by artists like Sundance Head, Kalimba, Infinite Journey and more, Epicenter set up a full stereo FOH hang, a monitor system with dBTechnologies DVX DM TH self-powered wedges and Allen & Heath dLive S5000 Surfaces with DM64 MixRacks for both FOH and monitors.

Epicenter’s Jeff Krebs said, “We attended a dLive demo about a year ago and we all fell in love with the speed, performance and flexibility of the console. It’s a nice desk for us because it’s flexible enough to do both live sound and corporate. But, the sound quality of the console was, hands down, the reason we bought the desks. And, before they hit our dock we had one in route to George Strait in Vegas and the other in route to the high school musical awards in Austin.”

“At GrapeFest, the dLive performed flawlessly,” Krebs said, “We set up scenes for FOH and monitors starting from a default that stores a basic festival patch. And, every place we go we save a file for that particular room and that event. So, we’ll have our file from Main Street next year already set up.”

Krebs continued, “We had a little bit of concern because we’ve used the same two engineers on this stage for the past four or five years and they’re both George Strait guys. However, this year George Strait elected to do a benefit for the victims of the Houston flooding. So we had to put in two different engineers, neither of which had ever mixed on the dLive. But, within minutes, they were both up and running and we had four days of absolutely flawless performance.”

Krebs himself mixed a band called, “Strangelove”, one of the top Depeche Mode tribute bands in the country. He said, “Some die-hard Strangelove fans came to GrapeFest from California and one commented that this was the best the band had ever sounded and the truest to Depeche Mode.”