Austin, TX (April 5, 2023)—South by Southwest is always an exciting time, and with the first properly post-pandemic edition held this spring, the British Music Embassy stage was back in business, hosting up-and-coming UK artists. In all, more than 50 acts, including Venbee, Sports Team, Robocobra Quartet, Sans Soucis and Sipho took the stage to tear it up.
While high-end audiophile brand Bowers & Wilkins might not be the first loudspeaker company to come to mind if you were asked to guess what P.A. was used, it is nonetheless what they had on hand, with a specially scaled-up system that packed a wallop for the thousands that attended shows there over the course of the festival.
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Meanwhile, at front of house, bands were mixed on an Allen & Heath dLive S5000 surface, paired with a DM0 MixRack. That console fed into a continuity system, powered by a compact CTi1500 console and DM64 MixRack handling the various PA feeds and Shure wireless microphones for hosts and presenters.
By the stage, monitor wedges and IEM mixes were controlled from another dLive S5000 surface with its own DM64, providing 128 channels of independent processing and 64 fully configurable buses.
“I love mixing on dLive,” said Jez Dabbs, house engineer at the BME stage. “It’s my desk of choice back home; it makes my life a lot easier when I show up to a venue like this and I know I’ll have all the tools I need.”
Meanwhile, Allen & Heath consoles could be found at multiple other venues around SXSW – including a dLive C1500 at the White Claw Shore Club, an Avantis at Sellers Underground, SQ at the Mohawk club, and multiple analog ZED and GL consoles peppered throughout.
