2018
As part of a major audio upgrade, Thomaston's historic Thomaston Opera House in Thomaston, Connecticut, recently added Allen & Heath's digital mixing system dLive S Class with Surface S5000, DM48 MixRack and DX32 Expander. Opera House is home to the Landmark Community Theater featuring "Spamalot", "Hairspray", "Grease", "Mamma Mia!", "Diary Of Anne Frank" and "It's A Wonderful Life" during the 2017 season.
The new Opera House audio system is designed and installed by DNR Laboratories of Watertown, CT. DNR Ian Jones ("Dr. Jones"), who also acts as an independent FOH engineer, recommends dLive performances and mixes many shows at the Opera House.
"DLive is the perfect console for this type of theater," Jones said. "For Hairspray we have about 50 mics and I can put it anywhere on the table and it can be changed for every scene easily and quickly, so I do not have to jump back and forth from bank to bank or in layers. "
Jones uses the internal DEQ EQs dLive and compressor to form individual vocal microphones. "Then I drove all the mic to a subgroup," he said. "And, I'm EQ subgroup to get rid of any feedback." Jones added, "I love the revised new dLive firmware that gives me 64 multi-band and dynamic EQ compressors that I can use for a mic or basically anything."
In addition to forming and customizing the base, Jones uses the dLive effect to improve instruments and sound. "I use a pitch shifter to fatten things up," he said. "Suddenly, my part of four strings sounds like twelve or one supporting vowel sounds like a chorus." Transients are controlled and improved through the built-in Transient Controller. "Especially when you're doing a rock show type you need a lot of punches and clarity," he said. "So I created a sub-group of drums and used a Transient Controller to increase the attack, and then I adjusted the draw and input and the production results."
"Functionality and tools like these are the most important things to me," Jones said. "With dLive, I do not have to beat the console to bow to my work, and I have not found anything I want to do in a theater environment that I can not do in dLive that's what brings the whole system together!"