Overnight in February 2022, Hillsong Church Ukraine’s weekly services were forced from its building on the outskirts of Kyiv to an underground air raid shelter, and throughout this period, the church employed an Allen & Heath dLive mix system based around a DM48 MixRack, controlled via a touchscreen PC running dLive Director.
“When the war broke out, the DM48 MixRack was used to broadcast our services,” says Roman Kozak, head of the production team at the church. “We took it with us, and it provided all the necessary functionality for broadcasting and monitoring while being extremely portable.”
As the church’s services returned to the normal location later in the year, Hillsong decided to expand the functionality of the dLive system, calling on RealMusic, Allen & Heath’s exclusive Ukrainian distributor, to help in the decision-making process. With the backbone of the system already in place, the church and RealMusic agreed that the addition of a 36-fader dLive S7000 surface would be the logical next step.
With the S7000 deployed at FOH, the touchscreen PC running Director shifted to monitor duties with the MixRack’s 128 processing channels split between the two roles. To complement dLive’s integrated DEEP Processing, the surface’s first digital I/O port was fitted with a 128-channel Waves V3 card to integrate external processing. A Dante card is also fitted to the system for the transport of the broadcast mix as well as audio distribution throughout the four-storey building.
Onstage, a DX168 remote audio expander is utilized for portable analog I/O on the opposite side of the stage to the MixRack, with 16 mic/line inputs and 8 line outputs, feeding the DM48 via Allen & Heath’s proprietary DX protocol.
“It is very comfortable to work with the Hillsong team,” adds Volodymyr Golovan, head of the Pro Audio and Systems Department at RealMusic. “They are very proactive, self-educated, always come with a straight request and expanded vision of future system complexity. They develop a lot of locations under one roof, concert hall, broadcast room, recording and rehearsal studio, so we knew that Allen & Heath’s digital mixing ecosystem would be the perfect choice for their facility. The war has slowed down this development but it did not stop, and I am sure that in the near future, together with Hillsong, we will finish this project at the full scale.”
