Last summer at LifeMission Church, we retired an aging Digico S21 audio console and installed an Allen & Heath dLive S7000 Control Surface in concert with a DM64 MixRack. The dLive is Allen & Heath’s “flagship digital mixing platform, designed for demanding touring, corporate AV, houses of worship, broadcast, and install applications.”
In our world of limited staff and big audio needs, the dLive just makes sense.
Beyond the marketing copy, the dLive offers a combination of seven live sound mixing controllers as well as personal monitor mixers in a variety of configurations that connect to A&H’s impressive MixRack, which offers the 128x64 digital architecture in various I/O configurations (64, 48, 32 channel all the way down to the zero analog input/output DM0 network interface audio only). It’s a powerful platform that’s designed, at least in part, with churches in mind, but it's just as capable on the road supporting touring acts.
What We Love ❤
The S7000 is flexible
What you need to understand about the S7000 is that it is (mostly) just a control surface, not unlike a MIDI controller. Most of the control and processing happens in the MixRacks. The A&H dLive S-Class control surfaces, including our S7000 can work with any of the MixRacks. It just depends on how much room you want on your control surface, and that’s why we picked the S7000—it’s the right price point for the working room we need. It’s also the more ‘robust' chassis of the two class options, as the S-Class offers dual power supply slots for redundancy, and dual redundant audio connections, so I know it will be rock-solid for years to come.
Like I said, there’s so much room to work.
After a year, we’ve barely scratched the surface on the number of available channels. I’m not sure we ever will. The S7000 is equipped with 36 faders arranged into three 12-fader grids. The faders are split into groups of 12, which are further divided "vertically" six layers deep. There’s more channel space there than we’ll ever get to, and that was part of the point in buying that particular control surface—our team has grown, and we needed space.
Each fader is customizable to any input, output, bus, DCA, or VCA, so the options are seemingly endless.
The dLive strikes a rare balance—deep enough for pros, simple enough for volunteers.
The control surface is approachable for volunteers.
Don’t get me wrong, here—the old console is on a platform that’s a great choice for pro tours and high-end integrations. At our church, we rely heavily on volunteers so that our production tech, contract engineer, and I aren’t required to mix every single event in the main room. We found the S7000 looks familiar right away for anyone who’s worked with digital consoles like an X-32, PreSonus, or even someone who used an analog console (as rare as that is now).
That being said, the console offers as much depth for routing options and external integrations like Waves Soundgrid as the Digico we were using previously.
After a year with the dLive, we’re still discovering just how capable and user-friendly it is.
For a specific example, in a few minutes, I was able to teach our Connections Pastor how to fire up the whole A&H system and get to a couple of mics and some house music. He has almost no experience with audio consoles other than the most basic stuff he’s learned over his years of serving in churches. On our old console, I had a printed, laminated checklist that explained how to fire up the system, and even with that, some our volunteers had difficulty getting a mic and house music going.
The dLive is the right console for our context—we have larger room that needs a powerful audio system, but we don’t have the liberty of lots of staff to run that equipment all the time, so the less complicated we make it, the better. The dLive offers a sweetspot for us and our team that we’re really happy with.
The S7000 is really just the steering wheel—most of the engine lives in the MixRack.
Dyn8 Engine is Over the Top
The Dyn8 effects engine comes from the factory on a dLive console. It’s wildly powerful—four multiband compressors combined with four dynamic EQs, and you can add it to any combination of 64 input or output channels on your MixRack --- independent of your other effects (FX) stacks.
This 4x4 compressor / dynamic EQ duo allows an engineer to adapt vocalists’ and musicians’ audio to the room and PA hardware. Any good engineer knows that every room is different and not often “dialed in” acoustically, so having Dyn8 as part of the factory FX gives engineers a lot of working room depending on their specific situation. Dyn8 is a beast, and we love it.
What We Don’t Love 🤔
No Bus-to-Bus Routing.
There are workarounds for this but having bus-to-bus routing would be so much simpler than having to trick groups or aux mixes into doing the same thing. We do miss that feature from the Digico, but the pros far outweigh the cons overall.
The Factory FX are Pretty Mid.
Other than Dyn8, the factory FX on the controller are pretty basic. Parametric EQ, dynamics controls, reverb, delay—the normal stuff that lots of other mixers offer. Given the price point of the system, this isn’t unexpected, but I will give credit to A&H for including Dyn8, which creates a huge value proposition for buyers.
Given the factory FX on the S7000, we still lean into Waves for many of our FX. That being said, Allen & Heath offers an upgrade called RackUltra FX that brings their premium FX to any dLive console, and if we didn’t already have Waves, we would have most likely purchased that. The older our Waves server gets, the closer we are to purchasing RackUltra FX, but that’s probably a couple of years down the road for us.
Overall—We Are Beyond Happy 😊
Since integrating the Allen & Heath dLive S7000/MixRack system last May, we’ve been nothing but happy with our Allen & Heath equipment, and we look forward to leveraging everything it can do for years to come. We would wholeheartedly recommend that other churches our size (~1400-seat sanctuary) to consider this dLive platform and MixRack. It’s flexible, tactile, and just downright fun to use.
If you have any specific questions, reach out to me at joseph.cottle@lifemission.church
