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Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., recently updated their 7,200-seat main auditorium with new Yamaha Rivage PM10 digital consoles for at both the monitor (shown here) and front-of-house positions. Photo courtesy of Ben Gustafson.
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Andy Strebel, technical ministries director at St. Paul United Methodist Church of Gulf Breeze, Fla., uses two, cascaded PreSonus StudioLive 24.4.2AI digital consoles which provide a 48-channel system.
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The rapidly growing Eastgate Christian Centre in Auckland, New Zealand, chose Allen & Heath’s dLive S7000 digital mixing surface because of the options it offers for future expansion.
Choosing a new mixer for your house of worship is not an easy task considering the countless options now available. The good news is that all those options represent competition, and competition means you get more for your money. Compared to just five years ago, today's digital mixers offer significantly more power and features at lower price point.
In this article, we'll look at top factors to consider when shopping for a digital mixer. We'll start with the most basic and work up to the most significant.
1. Physical Size and I/O Placement
Unlike an analog mixer, the capabilities of a digital mixer don’t correlate to its physical size. If you’re replacing an analog mixer with a digital model, you’ll likely have room to spare in your sound booth or control room. It’s better to be safe than sorry, though, so your high-tech mixer search should start with a low-tech tape measure. Measure your space and keep those numbers handy.
Consider also how your space is laid out, and where your cables flow. Most digital mixers have their input and output (I/O) jacks on their back panel, but many smaller mixers have their jacks on top. Be sure to include extra space for these connectors.
Will you be frequently changing out cables, or moving the mixer? If so, top-mounted jacks can be a great convenience (especially for a church-in-a-box). Whether your mixer is stationary or nomadic, be sure what you purchase will work within your space. There’s nothing worse than having to spend as much on unexpected sound booth renovations as you did on the mixer itself.
2.Inputs & Outputs
For all their magic, digital mixers still can’t pull signals out of thin air. Each live signal requires a physical input somewhere. Digital mixers come with a decent complement of built-in physical I/O, but that’s only the beginning of the story. Most digital mixers can process many more channels than are represented by physical inputs on the mixer itself. Unlike adding an external analog sub-mixer to bump channel count, these additional inputs offer the same processing and control as the built-in inputs.
Using additional channels in a live setting requires external I/O boxes. These boxes handle the A/D and D/A conversion, usually sitting by the stage and connecting to the mixer with a small computer networking cable (a “digital snake”). External I/O boxes are not cheap, and maxing out your channel count will often involve spending as much as you did for the actual mixer.
How many inputs are enough? Plan your mixer purchase based on your current number of inputs plus some room to grow. Multiplying your current inputs by 1.25 or even 1.5 is a good rule of thumb. If your desired input count exceeds the physical inputs on the mixer, include the cost of external I/O in your figures.
3. Automation & Connectivity
One of the most significant advantages of digital mixers for houses of worship is the ability to save, recall and automate mixer settings. Some digital mixers can control other devices, or be controlled by them. Look at your current sound, video and lighting systems and consider the amount of automation or interconnectivity you have. Then imagine where you’d like to be in a year or two.
Do you need to be able to trigger scene recall from a computer? Synchronize with a lighting controller? Do you need full automation of individual channels? Do you plan to do multi-track recordings to a digital audio workstation? If so, how many channels do you need to record? Does the mixer need to handle playback tracks from a computer? If so, how many, and in what format? Does your digital mixer need to connect to a video switcher?
These are just a few of the connectivity questions you need to consider, and getting answers to these probably involves the steepest learning curve for most people. Read all you can about MIDI, USB audio, Firewire, word clock, Dante and similar digital audio networking systems. All of these come into play at various price points, and all are key to connecting your digital mixer to a larger audio/video production system.
When it comes to connectivity and interfaces, all digital mixers are not created equal. Make sure the mixer you purchase plays well with all your other gear.
4. On-board Processing
Another major advantage of the digital mixer is the mind-boggling amount of signal processing it can offer. As computer power gets cheaper, manufacturers deliver more processing power for the buck. It’s not uncommon today for even inexpensive mixers to boast four-band EQ, dynamics, gating and filtering on every input, buss and output. Many have multiple 30-band graphic EQs, feedback suppression, automatic mic mixers, pitch correction and more.
Beyond individual channel processing, digital mixers offer send-style effects units. The purchasing factors here are 1) how many processors, 2) what effects and 3) what quality. The more internal effects units a mixer has, the more you can enhance a mix. The more diverse the palette of effects, the more sounds you can experiment with. Finally, the quality of the effects (i.e., smoothness, density or realism of the reverbs) can make a big difference in the depth and professionalism of your mixes.
Digital mixers differ greatly in this area of on-board effects. Some mixers offer just two processors, others four or more. Some have just a handful of effects algorithms (i.e., just three reverb types) while others offer a great variety. Quality of effects also varies widely, even within a given price range, and the only way to know where a mixer falls is to actually listen to it.
Mixers with ample DSP power can also perform all this magic at higher sample rates (88.1 or 96 kHz). Whether these sample rates make an audible difference in real-world situations is up for debate, but one thing is sure: higher sample rates certainly won’t hurt.
5. User Interface
The most important factor to consider is the digital mixer’s interface style. Modern mixers are now sprinkled along a continuum from analog-like (many knobs and small displays) to tablet-like (few knobs and large displays). Consider your primary users. Are they “old-school” knob jockeys that will balk at having to mix on a tablet, or are they Millennials that already manage their lives through a four-inch screen? All generations can learn new things, but you must at least give consideration to their comfort zones.
How well the user interface is designed also has a significant effect on the learning curve.
This is not a function of the interface style—a poorly designed interface is clunky to use and hard to learn, whether it’s mostly knobs or mostly touchscreen. As with quality of sound, this is an area you can’t truly discern without some hands-on time. If at all possible, arrange a demo or attend a trade show so you can actually use (and hear) the mixer.
In almost all cases, the user interface is no longer limited to the mixer itself. Most manufacturers offer an app (or two or three) that allows tablets and smart phones to control the mixer. Do you need to mix by WiFi from a tablet? Do you want performers to control their own monitor mixes with their phones? Do you need one person at the mixer for front-of-house and a second person mixing monitors from a tablet? Do you need user access control to restrict who can do what?
Explore the remote control capabilities of the mixer to make sure it will meet your needs. Learn about how the various manufacturers approach the anything-goes world of digital mixer interfaces, and consider all the exciting possibilities. With an open mind, you may discover that a new mixer can do more than just bump your channel count or add some cool new effects. A new digital mixer, chosen well, could revolutionize your approach to sound. Now that’s a cool feature.
