Allen & Heath's dLive Manages Stadium Concert for Plácido Domingo

	Audience and FOH during the Plácido Domingo concert. Photo: Daniel Sánchez

Two Allen & Heath dLive systems were recently used at front-of-house and monitors for a special concert held at Santiago Bernabéu stadium in Madrid by the famous tenor, Plácido Domingo. With an audience of 70,000, the concert was a celebration of Plácido Domingo's 75th birthday and also an important fundraising event for welfare projects in Latin America.

Performers comprised Plácido Domingo with guest artists, including Italian tenor, Andrea Bocelli; Columbian musician, Juanes; Fehr, from Mexican rock band, Maná; Mexican singer, Alejandro Fernández; and Spanish musicians, Alejandro Sanz and David Bisbal. The artists were supported by a full band, symphonic orchestra, choir, mariachis band, and flamenco band.

The technical production was managed by Production Resource Group (PRG) Spain, which selected a MADI-enabled dLive S7000 control surface and DM64 MixRack with two additional DX32 audio racks fitted with AES output cards, at front-of-house alongside DiGiCo SD7 and SD10 consoles, to mix the orchestra, choir, band, and vocals. A second S7000 and DM64 system with an SD10 was installed at monitor position.

Using dLive, Sergio Cianca, monitor engineer in charge of mixing the mariachis and flamenco bands, commented: "The learning curve of dLive is simply amazing. You can go straight to work after just a few minutes, even if you haven't used an Allen & Heath systems before. Another nice thing is that if you go deeper into the system, you'll find lots of remarkable options and tricks. To summarize, dLive is a system that makes basic operation easy but offers lots of features to those that want to go beyond this and 'push' the system."

The other engineer using dLive at the concert was front-of-house engineer, Juan Vinader, who mixed the symphonic strings, mariachis, and flamenco bands. He said: "The high quality of the preamps in dLive is easily noticeable when you PAFL any of the input sources. The working parameters at this gig was something like several dozens of input channels, processed and mixed as stems, and passing through more than just one mixer before reaching the PA system. As a consequence, it was difficult to tell the true sounding character of each mixer but this situation changed every time that I used headphones to monitor any of the input sources connected directly to dLive, which allowed me to see that the dLive preamps are transparent, rich, and have a great headroom."