Worship leaders at Sugar Creek Baptist Church in Sugar Land, Tex., needed to upgrade the front-of-house audio console to accommodate services in the church's main sanctuary. But it wasn't as simple as selecting a product and purchasing it. As one of the largest houses of worship in the U.S. with nearly 10,000 members, multiple campuses, weekly live broadcasts and four distinct types of services every Sunday, they needed something that was very adaptable and easy to use. They chose the Studer Vista V 42-fader digital mixing console.
“The first service is more traditional with a choir and orchestra; the second service is a more modern, blended service with a choir; the third is a Spanish language service; and the fourth is very modern and band-driven, with a huge lighting and audio system,” says Matt Rhodes, Director of Technical Production for Sugar Creek Baptist Church. “These services typically host anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 people and thousands more via our live broadcasts, and there are only 12 minutes between services, so they require very quick transitions.”
"These services typically host anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 people and thousands more via our live broadcasts, and there are only 12 minutes between services, so they require very quick transitions."
Matt Rhodes
Director of Technical Production, Sugar Creek Baptist Church.
Each Sugar Creek Baptist Church service is broadcast live, and then rebroadcast for later viewing. The Studer Vista V digital console enables the church to meet the needs of all three services, with a seamless transition from one to the next. Based on the same Infinity Core processing as the Vista X, but in a smaller chassis, Sugar Creek's Vista V is equipped with two 400-channel Infinity Core engines (200- and 800-channel options are also available), which provide 12 A-Link high-capacity fiber digital audio interfaces with more than 5,000 inputs and outputs. A newly designed high-density I/O system is used to break out these A-Link connections to standard analog, digital and video interfaces. The A-Link interface also provides a direct connection to the Riedel MediorNet distributed router, allowing many Infinity systems to be connected together with router capacities of 10,000 x 10,000 or more.
“The Studer Vista V allowed us to customize the system to meet our specific needs,” says Rhodes. “It is working very well, and we couldn't be happier with it.”
“When we introduced our latest range of Studer products, we were confident that these consoles would provide a major step forward for broadcast applications,” says Katy Templeman-Holmes, Director, Solutions & Marketing, Broadcast, HARMAN Professional Solutions. “Many houses of worship, including Sugar Creek Baptist Church, and their teams have done an outstanding job of deploying the technology and providing a better overall experience for their global audiences.”
