Electronic music and live performance venue The Bassement Club in Madrid recently underwent a significant audio system upgrade featuring a raft of Allen & Heath equipment.
Located in the heart of Madrid’s leisure district, the club boasts 1000 square metres of floor space divided into two areas and has become a destination venue for the city’s musicians, artists and clubbers. The newly-installed audio system is built around an Allen & Heath dLive C1500 control surface with a DM0 MixRack (fitted with Dante and DX Link networking cards), three DX168 and two DX012 Expander units and a Dante-equipped AHM-64 Audio Matrix Processor.
According to Adriano Masián, technical director of the club and responsible for the installation, “We decided on Allen & Heath products partly because we had several guys that we trusted recommending them. Looking at the different options we realised that the Allen & Heath system was going to be best suited to the needs of the room, both in terms of versatility and functionality.”
Once the installation was complete and after a running-in period, Adriano says, “We are very happy with the result – the systems work very well and are really stable. The console is easy to use and very intuitive and the DX stage boxes have worked perfectly for us – in all the live performances I’ve had with various musicians they have fulfilled their function perfectly.”
The AHM-64 is a 64×64 matrix audio processor for installation, offering 12 x 12 local analogue I/O and network audio I/O port up to 128 x 128. It uses a 96kHz FPGA core with ultra-low latency and features 64 configurable processing outputs, mono/stereo zones or loudspeaker processing.
The DX012 is an audio expander with 12 XLR outputs and AES functionality for dLive and SQ Series. It offers 96 kHz resolution for Allen & Heath digital mixing systems and is configurable as 12 analogue line outputs, eight analogue line outputs + four AES stereo outputs, or four analogue line outputs + eight AES stereo outputs. It connects, via a single Cat5e cable, to a dLive surface, a dLive MixRack, an SQ mixer or sends signal flow to a DX expander via a secure EtherCon port, and its second EtherCon port allows redundant connection to compatible hardware or to connect in series and send signal flow to a DX expander, for additional remote I/O.
DX168 is a rugged, portable expander for adding remote I/O to dLive S-Class and C-Class systems. It incorporates 16 microphone preamps with independent phantom power indicators and eight line outputs via XLR connections. Up to six DX168 units can be connected to a single dLive system – four via the MixRack and two via the control surface – providing up to 96 remote inputs and 48 remote outputs in addition to those provided by the MixRack and control surface.
With a form factor of just 4U, DM0 is dLive’s most compact MixRack and is aimed at distributed audio and digital split applications. It houses an XCVI processing core complete with audio I/O, control and audio network ports. It can be controlled with a dLive surface, using a laptop or iPad, Allen & Heath IP remote controllers or third-party controllers, via TCP/IP. The unit offers 128 input channels, 64 mix outputs and 16 RackExtra FX.
