After lying unused for nearly 30 years, London's Islington Assembly Hall has reopened – with an Allen & Heath iLive digital mixing system to manage both FOH and monitors.
‘We chose iLive for several reasons,’ explains Events Operations Manager, Dan Turner. ‘First, it sounds great and much better than many other digital desks out there – Allen & Heath clearly spent a lot of time getting the preamps right. It is also an incredibly versatile system in the way it works, and pretty much any input or output can be configured to do what you need it to do.
‘I have mainly used analogue desks in the past, and iLive almost feels like it is one, as the design is more hands-on than menu driven,’ he continues. ‘This helps you get to grips with the beast a lot more quickly than with other digital desks where features can be hidden in layered menus and thus almost useless in the live environment.’
Originally opened in 1930, the fully refurbished 800-capacity Hall now hosts a busy rota of live music, as well as a vast range of events from conferences and parties, to vintage fashion events. The A&H system it has installed comprises and iDR-48 and iDR-32 MixRacks with two iLive-T112 Control Surfaces
However, the original venue refurbishment plans did not include the installation of a mixing desk, and no multi-core was laid.
‘The beauty of this digital system is that to increase the number of available channels all we need to do is use a larger mix rack, there’s no need to dig up the floor to install a cable,’ Turner points out. ‘Having the mix rack on stage and the control surface at the rear of the hall connected by a single Cat5 cable was a big selling point.
‘We needed an elegant solution to stage monitoring using as few cables and as little space as possible. Using two iLive systems connected together we have achieved this. All signals are routed to where they need to go without the need for active splits on the floor saving valuable space’
The venue also installed an Electro-Voice XLE181 line array with additional front fills and subs, and Martin Audio monitors on stage.
‘Overall, the system sounds fantastic and will enable us to meet all the challenges that our varied events calendar will throw at us,’ Turner concludes.
More: www.allen-heath.com
