Recently equipped with Allen & Heath dLive S7000 mixing systems for FOH and stage monitoring, plus an S5000 for broadcast needs, Wave Church’s Great Neck Campus in Virginia Beach, Virginia, has completed a major audio upgrade. Engineered and implemented by S&S Productions, the system improvements bring new levels of control and flexibility to the campus.
Future-proofing the system was addressed in the upgrade, as was the need to provide the volunteer staff with gear that was intuitively easy to use. ‘Even if you’ve never seen them before, Allen & Heath dLive control surfaces have an air of familiarity,’ says S&S Productions’ Cory Sprenkle. ‘A world of control opens up on the touchscreens that’s as simple as the smartphones we use every day. Our volunteer operators were up-and-running in no time with little instruction.’
The 12-inch capacitive touchscreens on the dLive control surfaces feature dedicated ‘widget’ areas that can be set up to keep track of scenes, meters, FX, and other user-created control functions. Scenes are widely used at the Great Neck campus by all system operators, including Sprenkle, a member of the church himself.
‘Every operator has a different way of doing things, and with the dLive systems we can customise our template of controls, save it, and even import it within other shows so we can always mix in the fashion we’re used to,” he says.
Additional benefits include the ability to monitor and control the church’s Shure wireless microphone systems directly from the dLive interfaces or via a laptop computer using A&H dLive Director software. With 64 buses available at each control surface, stereo mixes became a routine reality in both the house and onstage, where over 14 IEM mixes were created. Networking capabilities were expanded with the use of Waves, Dante, and AES I/O cards, the latter of which were used to carry digital input to the system amplifiers. As a safeguarding measure, each of the new dLive mixing systems is equipped with dual redundant, hot-swappable power supplies.
Further complementing the upgrade is an Allen & Heath DM64 stagebox and several DX32 and DX168 expanders. ‘We can use 128 inputs simultaneously with far more than that available throughout the building,’ Sprenkle points out. ‘Fortunately, our DX32 and DX168 expanders will keep up with just about anything, including future dreams, for years to come.’
