Patrick Gourley, associate pastor of worship (left) and Dan Bakies, technical director at Christ's Church of the Valley's Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. satellite location.
As part of the plan for advancing their high-definition ministry, Christ's Church of the Valley in San Dimas, CA, has upgraded their main campus broadcast facilities to be all HD. At the same time, the church transitioned to Aviom's A360 personal monitor mixers and found that in addition to experiencing improved sound quality they were also seeing greater efficiency when transitioning between bands.
Before choosing the new generation of Aviom Personal Mixers for CCV, technical director, Dan Bakies, and his team carefully researched options on the new units comparing them closely with their existing Avioms, as well as personal mixers from other vendors. New features like the ability to have more channels and easy set-up pushed the new Aviom mixers to the top of their list. “With our current equipment, the only changes we needed to make was to unplug the old units and plug in the new ones,” says Bakies, who quips that it took more time to get the new units out of the packaging then to actually install them and get them working.
It took more time to get the new Aviom units out of the packaging then to actually install them and get them working.
Since the main campus sees six services a weekend and three different sets of musicians, the team decided to install the new A360s at the main campus (where they would see the most use) and use their older Aviom personal mixers at the new campus. “Wherever we use them, the time our Avioms save us during sound check by allowing bands to mix their own sound is invaluable,” says Bakies. He adds, “We've been very pleased with the performance and quality of Aviom and the new generation gives our musicians full control to get the mix just how they like it.”
Currently, 16 analog outputs run from Bakies' Allen and Heath console into an A-Net distributor that converts the signals to 24-bit, 48 kHz digital audio. An additional option card for their Allen and Heath Mix Rack will soon allow the church to provide 32 channels to the Aviom units. The new A360 Personal Mixers, optimized for in-ear monitoring, can mix more channels from a 64-channel network pool and store up to twenty mix snapshots. With the new Avioms, musicians at CCV can now add or remove different sources of ambient sound and control stereo image and placement.
The team at Christ's Church of the Valley says that using the Aviom A360 Personal Mixers has definitely allowed the broadcasts to step up in quality. As Bakies puts it, “When the band hears better, they play better. That gets us a better broadcast.”
