Pearl Baptist Church in Iron Station, North Carolina, recently updated their lighting, emergency and control systems. After calling RYGID, an audio, video and lighting integration firm, the team suggested Visual Productions’ CueCore3, a compact yet robust control platform distributed by ACT Entertainment.
“The entire building runs off Q-SYS,” says RYGID Director of Client Relations Will Carter, referencing the popular AV control platform. “CueCore allowed us to tie everything together in one spot; it became the linchpin.”
Founded by company President Ryan Gilbert a decade ago, Mooresville, NC-based RYGID works to bridge technical expertise with real-world applications. Though modest in size, Pearl's project was ambitious in vision — integrating architectural lighting, house lighting and emergency systems into a single, intuitive interface.
Gilbert says CueCore is a solution that the AV integration industry has long needed. “We’d been searching for a product like this for years,” he explains. “We hadn’t really found a reliable solution until now. We were either writing custom scripts or hacking together alternate ways. This product changed everything we were doing.”
RYGID’s work at Pearl Baptist Church wasn’t just about technology, it was about making that technology invisible. Additionally, for volunteers and staff unfamiliar with AV systems, the setup needed to be simple. “We created an ‘easy mode’ on an iPad that allows them to control the entire system — audio, lighting, everything — with just a few taps,” says Gilbert. “No matter if they’re hosting a wedding or hosting a funeral, or any other community event, they don’t have to have a professional technician available to help.” Carter says, “They figured it out immediately.”
“This is the architectural lighting control we didn’t know we needed,” Gilbert continues. “It controls standard fluorescent lights as well as LED fixtures and integrates cleanly with Q-SYS. We don’t even need a separate console. The flexibility to handle multi-universe DMX, Art-Net and sACN protocols, all within that Q-SYS-native framework, makes the product kind of a Swiss Army Knife for modern AV integration. Honestly, this product — and Visual Productions — finally gave us a real solution. It’s clean, it’s powerful and it makes sense for how people actually use these systems.”
Gilbert and Carter credit ACT not just for distributing the right products, but for supporting RYGID in helping bring those products to life. “When we ran into early firmware problems, the team at ACT was incredibly responsive,” continues Gilbert. “They helped us sort things out quickly and, once we updated, it was smooth sailing. The confidence we have now in the product, the brand and ACT is through the roof.”
While RYGID is still new to the ACT family, the firm is also exploring partnerships with the manufacturer’s/distributor’s other brands, such as PK Sound, Ultimate Support Systems and RapcoHorizon. “We work a lot in the smaller church market,” says Carter. “They don’t have massive budgets, so they need systems that are intuitive, reliable and don’t require full-time AV techs to run them. That’s what we bring, and that’s what ACT’s brands deliver. We see an opportunity moving forward to use the company’s premium brands in places that haven’t always been considered.”
