Recovering from severe storm flooding of its sanctuary, Castle Hills Church of San Antonio, Texas, has completed a major rebuilding project that has transformed a traditional worship space to contemporary and added a modern A/V system. Key to the audio provision are an Allen & Heath dLive S Class Digital Mixing System at FOH and an ME-1 Personal Mixing System for monitoring.

Castle Hills’ new worship centre was a significant departure from their previous space so the church called on Skylark AV to design and install the new A/V and lighting package, and also to provide a plan for this project and future expansion.

‘We had been using a smaller digital mixer but, for the new worship space, we needed more than just a bigger board,’ Castle Hills Technical Director, Tim Vencil, explains. ‘I wanted an ‘infrastructure’ that would support our in-ear system, our streaming broadcast and everything else in the room.’ After research and consultations with other engineers, Vencil chose the dLive S7000 Surface and DM64 MixRack with a DX168 Expander at FOH for the church’s wireless mic system.

‘I’ve never worked on a console that’s this flexible,’ Vencil says. ‘I use the left and right banks for inputs with the center bank as my outputs. And I use the layers as groups. We only have one service style at the moment but I use scenes for different songs. And, I love the color coding options on the channel strips.’

Vencil uses the dLive’s onboard EQ, reverbs, delays and de-essers. ‘I’ve been really happy with the built-in effects,’ he reports. ‘I’ve found some great reverbs and I love the Dyn8 multi-band compressor.’

For its musicians’ in-ear monitors, Castle Hills has 16 Allen & Heath ME-1s with an ME-U Hub. ‘The headroom in the ME system is awesome and I was blown away by how crisp and clean they sound,’ Vencil says. ‘When you move to 40 channels and the ability to do groups, that was a game-changer for us.’

More: www.allen-heath.com