Gateway Church began in a living room in the year 2000. According to Executive Director of Technical Arts Andy Engstrom, these days the church welcomes an average of 30,000 worshippers (either at its campuses or via broadcast), and holds five services every weekend. “From an audio standpoint, we use a broadcast audio position to take care of ingesting and mixing in a live environment, and then send it to a broadcast audience,” he explains. “There is virtually no delay––we're going to each of these campuses on fiber optic networks, and so there's very little latency.”
Throughout its campuses, Gateway Church is using a combination of Digico SD7s at its main campus, and SD8s, SD10s (of which the church now owns four in total), and SD11s for a total of 18 Digico consoles across its various facilities. “The consoles in our other auditoriums have traditionally been the SD8, but [for] the last couple of campuses we built, we decided to expand to the SD10,” Engstrom says. “The reason for the jump is I/O. We found at the last two campuses, technically we could have made the SD8 work but we needed a little more room because these [newer] campuses were a little larger.”
Engstrom notes that because Gateway has remained with the same console manufacturer for all of its facilities, the process of training volunteers is simplified. “We are able to take an SD11 or an SD9, which are in our children's rooms, and develop young operators and have them familiar with them so they can go into an auditorium that has an SD8 or an SD10, or an SD7, and find their way around very easily,” he explains.
