LONDON — The reopened 800-capacity Islington Assembly Hall in London has selected an Allen & Heath iLive digital mixing system, including iDR-48 and iDR-32 MixRacks with two iLive-T112 Control Surfaces, to manage both FOH and monitors.
More details from Allen & Heath (www.allen-heath.com)
Originally opened in 1930, the fully refurbished hall was reopened in 2010 having fallen into disuse for nearly 30 years. The venue now hosts a busy rota of live music, as well as a vast range of events from conferences and parties to vintage fashion events.
“We chose iLive for several reasons,” explains Dan Turner, events operations manager at Islington Assembly Hall, citing sound quality as a key factor. “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.”
Turner also credited iLive as “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 venue refurbishment plans did not include the installation of a mixing desk, and as such no multi-core was installed.
“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 continued. “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,” Turner continued. “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 EV XLE181 line array with additional front fills and subs, and Martin 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 concluded.
