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Silverdale Baptist Church in Chattanooga, Tenn., is in the planning stages for installing a third Allen & Heath dLive Digital Mixing System in its main Bonny Oaks Campus. The church recently acquired two dLives, one for its church campus in Ooltewah and a second for the church’s Creekside campus to be installed at FOH soon.
Matt Johnson, Silverdale’s Technical Director and Mark Randolph, the church’s Media Minister, considered several digital mixers but chose the dLive after an on-site demo at Bonny Oaks. “The more we listened to it and played with it, the more we loved it,” says Johnson. He adds, “All Silverdale campuses have a band on the stage and the Bonny Oaks campus typically has a 30-40 person choir. But, our congregation is diverse. So we meet in the middle between traditional and contemporary styles. The dLive fit our worship needs and could be scaled to each of our campuses while meeting our budget.”
At Ooltewah, Silverdale’s volunteer tech crew had been using older digital mixers from various brands and Johnson says the Allen & Heath dLive was a significant upgrade. “We’ve got a rock-solid crew and the guys were willing to dive in. The simplicity of dLive’s setup kind of threw us for a loop – it is as easy as dragging and dropping!”
“We’re trying to unify what we do, console-wise,” Johnson continues. “That way, a volunteer from another campus can walk up to the console and find things generally in the same locations. So it’s fantastic that the dLive makes it easy to assign inputs to layers in each bank.” And, Johnson notes the Ooltewah volunteers are using the dLive’s internal effects with no outside processing. “When you see the dLive’s latency at less than one millisecond, that’s impressive,” he says.
Silverdale purchased its dLives from Solid Rock Live in Chattanooga. The Ooltewah dLive consists of a C Class C3500 Surface, a CDM48 MixRack and a DX168 Expander. The Creekside dLive consists of a C3500 and CDM48. A third dLive will be configured for the Bonny Oaks campus.
Johnson concludes, “Allen & Heath has given us a console that I can scale from a 200-seat venue all the way up to a 2000-seat venue and operate the same across all variations while being cost-effective. It really has impressed us with its speed and versatility.”
