Established in 1824, Guildford Baptist Church recently completed a £7m renovation of its Millmead Centre, including the installation of a facility-wide A/V system based on a Dante network.
Opened in 1972, the Millmead Centre houses a 650-seat sanctuary, along with meeting rooms, classrooms, offices, a recreation hall, a lounge area and coffee bars. Graham Bennewith, Installation Director at DM Music – a company focussed almost exclusively on providing technology solutions for churches and protected historical buildings – was the engineer and manager for this project.
‘From planning and design to fundraising and installation, this project has been more than ten years in the making,’ he says. ‘The vision was to redesign the facility and bring it into the 21st century, making it more useful for the congregation and the community.
‘As part of the renovation, church leadership wanted a complete audio network solution to control, configure, and manage the main auditorium’s sound system, as well as easily share that room’s audio with auxiliary meeting rooms throughout the facility.’
The main sound system was more than 20 years old and not designed for full-range music production, while other large rooms’ audio systems were stand-alone, analogue-based, and not integrated with the main system. If the church wanted to share audio from the main auditorium to the other large rooms, cables would be through the corridors and doorways from space to space. The church also has more than a dozen other meeting rooms and smaller spaces where they wanted to share content.
‘The main auditorium needed a sound system capable of producing and running live music performances, and also have audio easily controlled and shared throughout the church,’ Bennewith says. ‘So, the biggest thing was being able to have the flexibility to get audio from any point in the church to any other point in the building with minimal disruption and minimal user interaction. For us, that means a Dante audio network.
‘The church had a Behringer X32 mixer, so we added a Dante card to link to a new Allen & Heath dLive, which is also Dante-enabled. Dante’s cross-brand flexibility means that any product can be used from any manufacturer. They also have guest groups and performers come in with their own Dante-enabled equipment, and we can bring them into our systems and share signals and DSP systems very easily and efficiently.’
Dante products at Guildford Baptist now include the dLive console, an Allen & Heath SQ5 mixer and a DT168 stagebox/preamp system, along with Yamaha MRX-7D and MTX-5D matrix signal processors, a Behringer X32, and a set of Ampetronic loop amplifiers for the hearing impaired. Dante Virtual Soundcards and Dante Via software have been installed on production PCs providing multichannel routing of computer-based audio.
The team uses Dante AVIO adaptors to connect non-Dante equipment to the network. These affordable, easy-to-use adaptors allow users to connect audio gear or computers to a Dante network.
‘Users want an A/V system that works simply and reliably,’ Bennewith says. ‘With easy-to-use touchscreen panels in every room, users can walk in, touch a button, and through the power of Dante, audio is instantly routed to that room.’
‘DM Music’s support during and after the installation has been excellent,’ says Duncan Stonehouse, church Operations Manager. ‘The quality of the audio system and user interface allows users to operate the system themselves. Plus, it has the flexibility to deal with all requirements of a large-scale performance in the auditorium, which is fabulous.’
‘The church held a service with three events happening simultaneously in three locations. Since the spaces were interconnected via the Dante network, participants could speak back and forth in real-time between the rooms,’ Bennewith reports. ‘Anytime a customer requires tying multiple spaces together, we recommend a Dante network. It gives us a ton of audio flexibility and allows us to be creative in designing a fun, easy-to-use, future-proof space that will meet the customer’s needs for years to come.’
More: www.dmmusic.com
