Guildford Baptist Church recently concluded an extensive £7m refurbishment programme that included overhauling the audio system in the building’s 600-seat sanctuary.

Supplied to the church – situated 30 miles southwest of London – and installed by church sound and A/V specialist DM Music, the new system includes an Allen & Heath dLive S7000 Surface and DM32 MixRack, complemented by a compact SQ-5 digital mixer and a pair of DT168 Dante-equipped audio expanders.

Serving multiple rooms and employed for its flexible deployment options, the dLive and SQ-5 combination is used both for the church’s own services and for community events and concerts.

‘When it came to providing a new system, we needed something that was rider-friendly for visiting engineers to use, so the dLive and SQ-5 were ideal,’ explains Graham Bennewith of DM Music. ‘When the church hosts large-scale concerts, the dLive is used at FOH with the SQ-5 for monitor duties and for various other uses. The ability to network everything via Dante adds very valuable flexibility, and the network capabilities allow for a very joined-up and versatile system which enables the dLive and SQ-5 to be used in multiple locations around the building very easily.’

All dLive and SQ mixers include AMM (Automatic Microphone Mixing) capabilities, with the option for multiple zones to be mixed simultaneously – a feature that DM Music leveraged to assist less experienced operators.

‘The church was in need of a versatile audio solution that could be used in a variety of situations and by people of very different levels of experience, from professional sound engineers to church volunteers,’ Bennewith says. ‘Although the Allen & Heath systems are extremely powerful, we can set them up for simple operation to take care of a handful of radio mics with an automix if necessary.’

With SQ and dLive being built on Allen & Heath’s XCVI Core (a 96kHz FPGA engine with ultra-low 0.7ms latency) there have been additional benefits for users at the venue. ‘The fact that the SQ-5 architecture makes it feel very similar to the dLive also makes it a great training platform for inexperienced users that need eventually to get hands-on with the bigger system,’ Bennewith reflects. ‘It’s been a great solution for the church’s needs.’

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A&H leads the service at UK church installs