This is a copy of a thread I posted over at prosoundweb, thought it might interest anyone considering buying an iLive.

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I recently installed an iLive IDR-48 and t112 in a venue in AZ, thought I’d share my impressions of the system for anyone considering it.

We did the install in a building used for music outreach for a church. There’s about 7 or 8 ‘house’ bands and live drama each night, with some video production and other elements.

The room is about a 300 cap room with three stages. Left and Right stages are band stages with the middle reserved for drama/skit productions. A standard night will have three bands playing with a handful of skits thrown in. The show will switch from band to band after each song, plus the dramas and video productions.

The idea was to create a somewhat streamlined system to accommodate the scene changes with some repeatability.

Our FOH was the t112, we used a fujitsu wireless tablet for mixing monitors, and also installed two PL-10 remotes for the drummers to create their own headphone mixes, aviom style.

The t112 channel strips fit perfect, as we had our inputs on the left and middle banks (left stage layer A, right stage layer B, drama stage layer C), and all FOH inputs, mains, FX masters on the right bank.

After setup, we spent the week creating each a stage left and stage right mix preset for each band. The iLive also lets you create channel strip presets in the ‘library’ that include an entire channels processing (preamp, eq, dynamics, etc). With this, you can create a setting “Jim Guitar” and wherever he plugs in, you can recall his settings.

After creating and saving generic mixes for each band, which included monitor levels and FX sends, sound check was a breeze. We created a new show with Saturdays playlist, plugged our scenes into the show, and stepped through the scenes. Granted, there’s mixing going on, but being able to recall your dynamics, eq, de-essing, etc with one button click makes it a no-brainer.

Opinions:
For all its amazing options and features, the iLive is really a treat to get set up. Things are where they make sense to be, and the flexibility of routing is very nice.

The color/text changing channel strip labels are much more than eye candy, a life saver in the heat of the moment when you wonder what fader you’re grabbing.

The ability to mix without the touch screen is great. You can do everything you need to in a live setting with dedicated knobs/faders, and no screen fiddling.

The network setup was incredibly simple. Getting the wireless tablet going was childs play, and the two PL remotes on the system configured so easy it was almost silly. (I guess we should expect that, right?)

I was impressed with how easy the volunteer crew learned and picked up the basics. That says something for the design/layout of the t112.

I was most impressed with the sound. I would point out that even with extreme settings, it still sounded natural. EQ’ing the daylights out of a less than stellar input (Beta52?) left me with nice results and not an ‘over processed’ sound.

When we were done with one of the early sound checks, one of the singers told me she felt like crying because she’d never heard their band sound that good. Awww…

The great thing is that a volunteer operator can walk up and recall a basic setup for one of these bands, and have (to a large degree) the basics all dialed in. Sure, there’ll be some fluctuations, but they should be able to mix levels and be 90% of the way home.

After a week solid with it, the only issue we had was when the wifi router and the tablet were using DHCP to choose their IP addresses. It would cause the touchscreen to freeze. Setting them to static IP’s per the manual (RT*M!) solved it.

I would certainly install or spec this board anywhere I was mixing.

http://www.soundadvicetraining.com