[ChopinGuy88Participant]

Thanks again, Steffen. Our A/V installer said that the GigaACE & Soundgrid cards are also problematic to come by at the moment – so think we’re kind of stuck waiting.

As a tangental question – if we wanted to get a waves card to use for broadcast – is it absolutely necessary to run a separate host machine and dsp server? Isn’t something like a new Mac Studio more than capable enough to run SuperRack in native mode for a single machine solution?

[ChopinGuy88Participant]

Thanks SteffanR – both of those are the options I’ve explored, but it seems both of those cards are also hard to come by. It appears we’re more or less buggered at the moment with the limited availability of their accessory cards. Our new mixing system have been sitting in our A/V contractor’s warehouse for close to a year before we see it installed – all because of accessory cards; crazy.

[ChopinGuy88Participant]

Haha – you are correct Brian – I was so stoked to see when that firmware just dropped recently. Funny that’s some of the features we were talking about just 6 months ago.

I might ask our contractor about the gigaace option if it comes down to it. Our stage box and expanders still have come in either – so we’d still need to wait for those. Just can’t believe some of the delays these things are seeing still. We just had the new Crestron control and video distribution portion of the system pushed to Q2-Q3 2023, and we placed orders / contracted in February this year – crazy.

[ChopinGuy88Participant]

Resurrecting this old thread to update – we decided to go with two Avantis consoles w/dPack for our solution – which will, ultimately, still be way more than we need. The only frustration is now both consoles are sitting with our contractor as the Dante cards are delayed until end of this year into 2023. Major bummer to have two consoles sitting in a warehouse unused because of accessory cards, but without them we’re dead in the water for our install.

[ChopinGuy88Participant]

Gotta ask another question – with dLive being released in 2016 – should there be any concern with obsolesce if purchasing into that platform in 2022??

[ChopinGuy88Participant]

Objectively speaking – no doubt – there doesn’t seem to be any reason that Avantis won’t do the job. I have a feeling that dLive will still be recommended from the overall system package and support perspective. Suppose it will just come down to are we ok with the added expense of dLive once we compare the two.

[ChopinGuy88Participant]

Thank you again, Brian. Looking at it from this perspective our bus outputs are very minimal – 2 main (L&R) and 3 fill zones – these 5 all go to the Meyer Galileo. Then we have 4 bus outputs that run to our stage box to drive an amp for when we want to use wedges (which we rarely ever use). That’s it – a total of 9 bus outs. Our Crestron control system handles the audio splits for room zones, and we use Aviom for IEMs – so neither of those eat up anything from the console. This would leave us a whole lot of headroom on either platform.

[ChopinGuy88Participant]

Chris – thank you for the thoughtful and experienced reply. Currently we send the broadcast audio to the control room via DANTE, and use a MacPro to mix the livestream in Logic. It’s frankly way too involved for volunteers, and there’s way too many potential failure points for inexperienced users. So moving to a console will definitely be a step in the right direction. I definitely agree with your approach of having uniformity in UI/operation to help everyone. Which is why if we go dLive it just makes sense to me to have both areas have the same platform (especially if we’re already investing in the C3500 and mixrack). Otherwise, as you noted, we can do 2x Avantis for a good deal amount less money than dLive.

Given that all our operators are volunteers – the Shure integration is a total nicety, not necessary. Though having the RTA features would be useful, and that’s something that the Avantis still lacks at the moment.

We shall see – the Vi3000 was acting weird again this weekend – so we might be moving towards this even more promptly now.

[ChopinGuy88Participant]

Thank you, Brian. That was something I could see in videos – if RTA was present. That’s too bad as even the SQ series has an RTA in the EQ section. As you said it would seem that is something they’ll certainly add in firmware, but that’s only speculation for now.

My guess is we’ll lean toward the dLive system, but I’m going to consult more with our contractor and our A1. If we go with dLive it will probably be C3500 FOH and C1500 broadcast. Initially we were looking at an SQ for broadcast, but if investing in dLive & mixrack it seems silly to not just put the smaller control surface in broadcast. If Avantis we’d just do two consoles with the dpack.

[ChopinGuy88Participant]

So I tried to edit a reply here, and it got deleted as spam – not sure what the deal is with this message board system. Trying again here.

Thank you both Brian and Scott for the thoughtful replies.

Brian – I am aware that the dLive family is a surface & mixrack configuration. In our case it looks to be about $28K more expensive to go with dLive over Avantis. We could actually do 2 Avantis consoles (FOH and broadcast) and 2 GX4816s for less than dLive.

Scott – our output utilization is very basic – as our Crestron control system does all the audio splitting/sends for our zones like you brought up. Right now on our Vi3000 the only buses we have coming off are the mains and 4 fill zones that still go through the Meyer Galileo for processing (it just allows us to control the output of these zones from FOH if needed).

Clearly the advantage of dLive seems to be in processing power. Given the generous 16FX racks and 64 instances of Dyn8.

Does the Avantis have the RTA features like dLive – also does the Avantis have the Shure wireless control like dLive? Those are two very useful tools I see in dLive’s favor.

[ChopinGuy88Participant]

Thank you, Steffen. I am aware of another Catholic church in town that just moved to an Avantis, and our A/V contractor has a couple C3500s in the field.

Suppose I was asking this more from the objective perspective given what I outlined in our use case. Technically either of these consoles are far more capable than what we need to mix in our setting. The Vi3000 (though it is dated at this point) is more than what we need, but it will certainly be nice to gain the newer internal processing capabilities on these consoles.

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