All images courtesy Yuriy Kochemasov
Overnight in February 2022, Hillsong Church Ukraine’s bustling weekly services were forced from a church building on the outskirts of Kyiv to an underground air raid shelter. During these dark times, the church pledged to continue to broadcast its services online, not just to provide musical entertainment, but also to inspire hope.
Throughout this period, the church had been using a compact dLive system based around a DM48 MixRack, controlled via a touchscreen PC running dLive Director, which had seen the church through the challenging early months of 2022.
“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 their normal location later in the year, Hillsong decided to expand the functionality of the dLive system, calling on the Pro Audio specialists at 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 dLive Surface would be the logical next step.
The church’s engineers opted for the 36-fader S7000, the largest Surface in the dLive range, with benefits including dual-redundant power supplies and Surface-to-MixRack connections, a pair of 128-channel digital I/O ports, dual 12” touchscreens and an array of assignable rotaries and softkeys for maximum flexibility.
With the S7000 deployed at FOH, the touchscreen PC running Director shifted onto 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-story building.
Onstage, a DX168 remote audio expander is utilized for portable analogue I/O on the opposite side of the stage to the MixRack, with 16 mic/line inputs and eight 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.”
