Allen & Heath’s new dLive mixing system appeared at London’s O2 arena recently, with King Charles supporting Mumford & Sons on their UK tour.

King Charles front-of-house engineer Jon Lewis employed a dLive S3000 console with an A&H DM64 mixrack for FOH, with an Allen & Heath GLD Chrome mixer handling monitor duties. Powerful beyond its diminutive size, the 20 fader, 12” touch-screen equipped S3000 allows for up to 120 fader strips and extremely fast workflow.

With credits including Roni Size, The Feeling and Clean Cut Kid, Lewis is a fast-rising UK FOH engineer, with extensive experience of Allen & Heath’s existing iLive mixing system. And he describes the dLive as being “…on another level. From the build quality to the GUI to the flexibility of the console, everything’s taken a huge step up. But it’s also extremely intuitive – we only had a day’s rehearsal with the console before the O2 show with King Charles but that’s all I needed to really get to grips with the dLive.”

Lewis was also impressed with both the sound of the new system and its dynamic processing capabilities, as he describes, “The first thing I noticed was just how crystal-clear the dLive preamps are; it’s simply a case of turning the faders up and everything sounds big and full right away. And one of my favourite new features is the added compressors on the channel strip, particularly the ‘opto’ comp, which allows you to dial in the ratio of wet/dry signal you need, effectively giving you parallel compression – it sounded absolutely fantastic on the drum group at the O2, for example.”