VIENNA, Austria — A combined Allen & Heath iLive and iLive-T system was used at the recent opening ceremony for the Vienna Festival, held in the city’s Rathausplatz, with two iLives at FOH.
The inaugural event saw the debut of a composition exploring the emotions and depicting scenes that characterize Vienna, Paris, Lisbon and New York, with musical styles ranging from blues, classical, Portuguese fado, French accordion, and jazz and soul from the U.S.
Adolf ”Tucherl” Toegel, the festival’s sound designer, had used an iLive-144 system to manage the FOH orchestra mix at last year’s opening ceremony, and opted for the two iLives at FOH.
A revolving stage was used for set changeovers, which included the need to move a grand piano on and off both sides of the stage. The blues band was permanently installed on one side and all the other bands were loaded on and off the other side.
“As there were two stages, I decided to design two separate FOH and monitor setups for each side,” Tucherl said. “Although there are digital mixers available that can manage the high channel count, there were quick band changeovers with announcements in between and also different sound engineers working for their artists, so two mixers was preferred.”
The FOH position was limited to 3.5 meters of space to house all mixers and FOH equipment, so Tucherl selected an iDR10 MixRack with iLive-144 Control Surface to manage the first stage and the new iLive-T80 Control Surface with iDR-48 MixRack for the second stage.
To enable the stage to turn, all the microphone multicore cables ran through a hole in the middle and fed to the rear where the microphone splitters for the FOH, monitor and OB van feeds were located, as well as the wireless microphone receivers, IEM transmitters and the two iLive racks.
“As well as the compact size, another major factor in the decision to use iLive was that the mix processing is separate to the mix surface, so we only needed to run CAT5 cable between the mixer and the stage,” Tucherl said.
Last year, the EtherSound B output from the iLive MixRack was used to record the rehearsals, which, together with a PC and a Digigram PCI EtherSound card using Nuendo, enabled Tucherl to record 64 channels of audio.
“The extraordinary feature on iLive is that you can switch all the inputs to the EtherSound B inputs and get exactly the same signals from the recording that you got from the microphones during the rehearsal,” Tucherl said. “Since we did not have many rehearsals, we used this feature to create an accurate mix for the orchestra. Nuendo allowed us to loop complicated musical parts and optimize the balance of the microphones without the need to have musicians on stage.
“I’ve been sound designer for the Vienna Festival opening ceremony for over 15 years, and I have used all brands of mixer,” Tucherl said. “Both iLive systems have everything that I needed to produce a good show, the handling is excellent and the sound first class.
“In my opinion,” Tucherl added, “a mixer should not have a ‘sound’ but should be neutral and not color the sound, so that only a small amount of EQ need be applied where necessary. iLive performs exactly this way, and it is able to manage classical as well as popular music.
“The surface is very intuitive, and you can configure the layout to access all inputs, outputs, groups, and DCAs with complete freedom to decide where you position the faders,” Tucherl said. “On top of that, the color coding on the LCD display helps to define the channel identity.”
For more information, please visit www.ilive-digital.com.
