North Boulevard Church of Christ in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, provides high-quality live audio in its main auditorium, broadcasts its worship services over a local television station, records them for use in a satellite church and provides simultaneous translation into Spanish and Chinese.
The church manages all of these services using a new sound and video system equipped with a pair of Allen & Heath GLD-80 digital mixers. “Our previous system was 17 to 18 years old, and it was designed for our needs at that time,” says Mike Jones, who oversees worship production for the church. “We wanted a system that sounded better and had better coverage. Also, we wanted a system that had the capability to handle everything we've been working into the worship service.”
Based on these goals, North Boulevard Church hired a consultant to do a survey and provide a basic system design. After a competitive bidding process, the church selected M3 Technology Group of Nashville to provide additional design services, and to install its new systems. M3 provided live audio and video systems as well as its broadcast and recording systems.
M3's CTO and project liaison, Chris Montini says the system uses a high-speed Dante digital audio network to feed all of the church's microphones from the stage to the studio for broadcast and recording. He says, “We installed Dante cards in the Allen & Heath GLD-80 mixers, and chose a wireless microphone system and a DSP that are also equipped with Dante.”
One of the GLD-80s mixes live sound in the church's auditorium. The second GLD-80, located in the studio, mixes audio for broadcast and recording. To simplify system operation, the two GLD-80s have the same setups for things like channel assignments, scenes and layers. This allows any of the church's tech staff to mix the live auditorium sound or the broadcast and recording sound with no additional training on the hardware. Wired microphones and other sources are connected to an Allen & Heath AR2412 AudioRack located behind the stage. The AR2412 feeds the Dante network and also connects to the GLD-80 mixer in the auditorium via the GLD's built-in digital snake.
North Boulevard Church has a choir-based music service with multiple wireless microphones. They take good advantage of the GLD's extensive digital signal processing capabilities and they mix stage monitors, the assistive listening and simultaneous translation feeds and a separate subwoofer mix on the GLD's aux buses.
Although the church had previously used an Allen & Heath analog mixer, Montini says he was pleasantly surprised at how quickly everyone picked up the new digital mixer. Jones says, “The GLD is intuitive and easy to learn. Once you understand the basics, it's fairly simple to operate.”
Paul Skidmore, who manages the church's broadcast services says, “I was blown away by how clean and professional M3 had installed the system.” Concerning the Allen & Heath mixers, he added, “the GLD is a monster board. The bottom line is we have total control.”
