With congregations across Europe, South America and South East Asia, it is the Munich branch of the International Christian Fellowship (ICF) church that has made a welcome home for the Allen & Heath dLive S5000 Surface and a DM48 MixRack that serve its Sunday Celebrations at Neuraum, a 2,400-capacity nightclub in central Munich.
A contemporary free church, CF was in 1996, uses modern event technology in its large-scale worship performances that it calls Celebrations. ‘Since we set up and tear down every Sunday, we needed a lightweight and flexible system,’ explains Marc Deisen, ICF Munich’s Head of Audio. ‘We also wanted a straightforward and intuitive control surface. The dLive fulfils exactly that with its menu structure, and it’s signal flow is very similar to analogue.’
Additional onstage I/O is provided by a pair of daisy-chained DX168s, with a 128-channel Dante card supporting digital I/O for wireless microphones, virtual soundchecks and general audio distribution throughout the venue.
The ICF Munich set-up is often moved to larger venues for the major Christmas and Easter holidays. For last year's Christmas Celebrations, they moved to the Munich Showpalast. Due to the distance between the stage and the mixing position, two fibreAce cards were used to provide a secure fibre optic connection between the DM48 and the S5000 at FOH.
After the success of the Munich setup, ICF Herrenberg opted for a similar setup in 2020, partnering an Allen & Heath dLive C3500 Surface at FOH with a CDM48 MixRack onstage.
‘As a test set-up, we had been given an Allen & Heath Avantis in addition to the dLive, but we needed ten stereo in-ear mixes for the band, various subgroups and three more aux paths for the stream, as well as a matrix,’ explains Head of Audio, Phillipp Reineboth. ‘The Avantis is a great console, but due to the amount of output paths, we finally decided on the dLive.’
Ten metres from FOH is the video control room used for streaming services to the internet. ‘We have an Allen & Heath IP8 controller in use there which the video technicians can use to remotely control the dLive for the live stream.’ Reineboth says.
Reineboth was advised by Matthias Weis of FullRange Events GbR, who also acted as an intermediary for the set-up. ‘We recently purchased a Dante expansion card from FullRange Events. It is installed in the MixRack and is mainly used for multitrack feeds and the integration of our radio links,’ Reineboth says.
As in Munich, the Celebrations at ICF Herrenberg are supervised by volunteers from the congregation, most of whom do not have a professional technical background. ‘I wanted to provide our audio team with a well-configured setup that can also be operated by laypeople,’ Reineboth says.
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