Originally opened in 1930, the fully refurbished 800-capacity 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. "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 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. 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," continues 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 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," concludes Turner.
(Jim Evans)
