Ukrainian church broadcasts through the war with dLive

Overnight in February 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced Hillsong Church’s bustling weekly services from a church building on the outskirts of Kyiv to an underground air-raid shelter. Despite this, the church pledged to continue to broadcast its services online, not just to provide musical entertainment, but also to inspire hope.

Throughout the enforced relocation, the church used a compact Allen & Heath dLive system based around a DM48 MixRack, controlled via a touchscreen PC running dLive Director.

Roman Kozak, head of the church’s production team, says: “When the war broke out, the DM48 MixRack was used to broadcast our services. 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 enlisted the help of RealMusic, Allen & Heath’s  Ukrainian distributor, to expand the functionality of the dLive system. With the backbone of the system already in place, the church and RealMusic agreed that the addition of a dLive Surface was 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 front of house, the touchscreen PC running dLive Director Director shifted on 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 utilised 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.

Volodymyr Golovan, head of the pro audio and systems department at RealMusic, says: “The Hillsong team is developing 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, we will finish this project at the full scale.”