Chicago, IL (February 16, 2023)—Over its four-decade history, the Metro Club in Chicago has gone through thousands of acts, hundreds of engineers and a fair amount of live sound gear, too. Since the pandemic began to cool off, the venue’s hosted acts like Metallica, Green Day, and Fall Out Boy, all of which got to perform through a new PA installed during lockdown. That audio upgrade highlighted a need to refresh the club’s console situation, and now that, too, has been rectified.
“In 2021, we changed everything about the PA—except the actual audio consoles,” recalled installer John Wagner of Ayre Productions. “They inquired about Allen & Heath’s dLive platform, so we set them up with a demo.” The team eventually decided to purchase two dual-screen dLive C3500 surfaces, along with a pair of CDM48 MixRacks. Both systems are each equipped with AES output cards, which allow them to feed the venue’s amplifiers using digital AES/EBU signals.
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“We’re a small venue that hosts a lot of big acts,” explained Ben Gordon, the Metro Club monitor engineer, “so we’re always trying to minimize our footprint without sacrificing functionality. dLive hit all the marks for us.” Justin Yates, who runs front of house, added, “We get a lot of guest engineers, some of whom aren’t familiar with digital consoles. With dLive, it’s easy to get them up to speed and mixing a show in a couple of minutes. Guest engineers are really excited to see the dLive consoles; even the folks who bring in their own console are curious and want to play around with a dLive.”
