Islington’s Assembly Hall, London, has opted for an Allen & Heath iLive digital mixing system as part of an audio system upgrade.
Orginally opened in 1930, the fully refurbished 800-capacity Hall was reopened in 2010, and now hosts live music, as well as conferencing events, parties and vintage fashion events.
Installed at the venue, the iLive digital mixing system from Allen & Heath – which this year named Audio-Technica as its exclusive UK distributor – comprises iDR-48 and iDR-32 MixRack, with two iLive-T112 Control Surfaces, to manage both FOH and monitors.
“We chose iLive for several reasons,” explained Dan Turner, events operations manager at Islington Assembly Hall. “Firstly, 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. 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.”
“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. 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,” continued Turner. “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 ElectroVoice 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!,” concluded Turner.
