An Allen & Heath dLive S Class system was selected for a recent open air performance of Alexander Borodin’s renowned opera ‘Prince Igor’ in the city of Astrakhan, southern Russia.

Staged within the central square of the Astrakhan Kremlin, the Astrakhan State Theatre Opera and Ballet performed against the dramatic backdrop of the Cathedral of the Assumption to an audience of over 5,000.

Russia’s MixArt was chosen to be responsible for audio for the event, having already worked successfully with the Astrakhan State Theatre on a number of high profile projects.
 
“With such a large number of microphones, stage monitors and a sound reinforcement system consisting of а main PA and a few delay speaker lines and front fills – all in the open air, it was a very challenging project,” explains Vadim Scherbakov, MixArt’s chief sound engineer for the project in the Astrakhan Kremlin.

Both FOH and monitor mixes were handled by a dLive system consisting of an S5000 and S7000 running in multi-surface mode on a DM64 MixRack and three DX Expanders. To handle the complexities of the large performance, the S7000 was used to mix the main orchestra and the S5000 mixed the vocalists, choir and instrumental soloists. Both consoles fed the main PA, delay speakers, front-fills and monitors.

The S5000 was equipped with a Waves V3 card for multitrack recording and a MADI card to enable sound effects playback.

Putting the dLive’s multi-surface capability to use for the performance, Scherbakov commented, “It was the first time I ever used a dLive system consisting of one MixRack and two surfaces and it worked perfectly with absolutely no issues with latency and synchronisation.”