Making their debut at the First Baptist Church of Arnold in front of the nearly 2,700-strong community that attends weekly services at this house of worship, two Allen & Heath dLive audio consoles proved their flexibility in handling services ranging from traditional to contemporary at the church, using an average of 80 inputs.
Installed by Nashville, Tennessee-based Morris Integration at the church just south of St Louis, Missouri, the new systems are based around an Allen & Heath dLive S7000 control surface at FOH and a dLive S3000 used for monitors. With an Allen & Heath dLive DM48 MixRack serving the house and a DM32 MixRack standing-in at monitor world, both MixRack processors use gigaAce networking cards to provide 96kHz audio and control transport via Ethernet over standard Cat5e.
‘Not all that long ago, it would have been crazy to think you could transmit that much audio over Cat5,’ says Morris Integration design engineer, Collin Adams. ‘But here we are today, and it’s reality. Being able to draw upon the powers inherent in this kind of technology is what allowed us to give the church the flexibility it desired along with sonic quality and performance transcending that of previous systems.’
The installation’s versatility is further enhanced through the use of Waves Audio networking cards, providing plug-in processing, audio distribution and digital mic splitting options. The cards support a direct 96kHz interface to the Waves SoundGrid networking platform, placing a wide variety of effects right at the fingertips of system operators. An IP8 remote controller equipped with eight motorised faders and an IP6 remote controller with six rotary knobs are also available in the house and onstage, bringing greater depth of command, with tactile control of bus masters, matrixes and other functions sometimes relegated to a console’s bottom layer.
‘When you consider all of this, and features like each dLive control surface’s ability to store scenes, have any input or mix assigned to any and every bank and/or layer, and place assignable SoftKeys plus pages of assignable rotaries in front of the operator, these systems can pretty much be configured in any fashion,’ Adams adds. ‘The church came to us with a need to build something that would take them well into the future. I feel we’ve achieved that goal, and have given them a great return on their investment along the way.’
To round out the upgrade, an array of Allen & Heath’s ME-1 personal mixers were added onstage, bringing each performer an opportunity to tailor their own sound.
