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Allen & Heath // GLD Digital Mixing System. Support for up to 48 channels.
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SSL // Live L500 Console. V3 software offers 40 new features.
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Studer // Vista V Console.
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Yamaha // TF5 Digital Mixer.
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Presonus // StudioLive Digital Mixing Consoles. Offers surface-driven operation & no menus.
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Roland // M-5000 Live Mixing Console. OHRCA architecture supports.
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Soundcraft // Vi5000 Digital Mixing Console. Features 96-kHz 40-bit floating point.
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Mackie // DL32R Digital Mixer. Tablet-based control of up to 32 channels.
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QSC // TouchMix Mixer. Full-featured, yet the size of a laptop.
A combination of very new technology, initially high costs and challenging user interfaces kept users in the house-of-worship market away from digital consoles in the beginning. And even to this day many smaller churches (and at least a few larger ones) continue to chug along quite happily with their analog mixers.
“There was also certainly a kind of comfort level that kept sound mixers at houses of worship with analog consoles for an extended period of time,” says Rob Read, marketing and communications manager for Roland. “And if analog was working well for a church, there weren't a lot of reasons to replace it, either.”
But the trend has shifted decidedly away from analog and towards digital for a growing number of houses of worship, and for good reasons. Prices have come down considerably; dozens of consoles from brands like Behringer, PreSonus, Yamaha, Roland, Soundcraft, Allen and Heath, Midas, Mackie and others offer 24-, 32- and 40-channel capacity with plenty of processing power for well under $5,000. User interfaces have improved dramatically, with a growing number of manufacturers implementing tiered levels of access and usability that let entry-level operators access basic functionality and more technically sophisticated users dive deeper.
That functionality has increased dramatically in recent years. Plug-in apps allow consoles to emulate the sonic and dynamic performance of hardware processors that used to cost twice as much as the newest consoles themselves. Collections of plugins designed to be used for live mixing have decreased in price even as they've increased in power, such as the Waves Genesis bundle, a collection of four plug-ins for live sound: the C4 multiband compressor for dynamic equalization and tone-shaping; Renaissance de-esser to control sibilant “ess” and “shh” sounds; Renaissance reverb for space and atmosphere; and the H-Delay for time-based effects.
Diving Into Digital
Critically, console manufacturers and plugin developers are collaborating on ways to create synergies between them. A leading example is how console maker Digico has taken Waves' SoundGrid low-latency signal-transport platform and integrated it into its own processor, allowing users to access plugin parameters directly from the console.
Matt Larson, national sales manager for professional audio products at Digico, says that kind of system integration is propelling the digital console category quickly in houses of worship, although he notes that uptake of digital consoles wasn't necessarily much faster in other verticals, such as tour sound, where the emphasis is also on the fact that every performance or event has to be done right, every time, and analog offered a sense of security. “It was really more of a transition that had to do with [changing] generations of people than with the technology,” he says. “Younger people were more ready to dive into digital.”
More Control
Plug-in apps allow consoles to emulate the sonic and dynamic performance of hardware processors that used to cost twice as much as the newest consoles themselves.
What digital technology has brought to the HOW environment has been substantial, and not a moment too soon, as more churches see more types of events and performances taking place inside their walls, including both traditional and contemporary styles of music, more elaborate theatrical productions during holidays, and the seach for additional revenue through third-party rentals of their venues. Read points out that digital consoles offer the ability to create complex preset scenes—individual input levels, automated fader moves, EQ curves, gates and other dynamics—for different types of events.
“So many churches have several styles of worhip music now, and the church's FOH mixers can have presets ready for each type stored in the console,” he explains. He also points to the various “permissions” levels—a concept borrowed from the IT domain in which manufacturers tier how much access different users can have to various levels of functionality. Roland's Open High Resolution Configurable Architecture (O.H.R.C.A.) technology, used on consoles like its M-5000, allows, among other things, the ability to give specific users "keys" to certain aspects of the console. For instance, he says, a pastor might just need one channel for a microphone for a simple midweek service; a single channel with preset EQ and compression means he or she would only need access to an on/off switch and a volume control. A volunteer running a more complex service would be given permission to access multiple channels' worth of dynamics and EQ; a staff FOH mixer would have full access to all of the desk's features to run a complicated special event.
“It's a way to have a church's volunteers and staffers ease into using digital audio at everyone's own rate,” says Read.
Size Matters
Digital consoles offer houses of worship an interesting collateral physical benefit, Michael Palmer, vice president of sales for Allen and Heath's U.S. operations, points out. “A 48-channel analog console is going to be seven-and-a-half feet long whereas a 48-channel digital console takes up about three feet,” he says. “As churches struggle to put more people inside without having to expand their buildings physically, this can make a real difference.”
In fact, when the complete infrastructure surrounding digital is taken into account—the replacement of hundreds of strands of copper with a few runs of CAT-5 or CAT-6 network cabling and rack spaces substantially reduced by the elimination of outboard hardware processing—the shift to digital can allow churches to seat a sizable number of extra congregants, based on the up to 20 square feet that each additional person needs in a typical church.
But digital is reducing the audio systems' footprints in other ways, as well. Palmer notes that the combination of the growing use of personal monitoring systems and the integration of remote operation of digital consoles using smartphones and tablets has in many cases eliminated the need for a separate monitor console. Allen and Heath's MixPad feature lets mixers use any iOS device, such as an iPhone or iPad, to mix both the front-of-house sound and stage monitors from anywhere in the room. The same capability is now available form virtually all digital console manufacturers, including Soundcraft, Yamaha, PreSonus, Behringer, Mackie, and Line 6.
Larson says that in addition to having a technical benefit, remote mixer operation also confers a cultural advantage, allowing FOH mixers to spend time with musicians on stage, understanding their environment and taking down what is often an experiential wall between stage and FOH position. “It can make them feel more like partners going for the same goal, rather than adversaries, which that relationship can sometimes be,” he says.
… perhaps the single biggest change that the migration to a digital console affords churches is that now the hub of the audio.
As importantly, remote operation allows the FOH mixer to listen to all of the sound in every part of room and adjust the mix for some of the more acoustically challenged areas, such as balconies. “It lets them find areas that no one ever knew were a problem,” Palmer says. He adds that remote operation can be a boon to churches with older architectural designs that create nooks where midrange speech intelligibility can get scrambled or where low-frequency nodes can build up. “It's a level of operational freedom that you could never have gotten from an analog console,” he says. “That's why it's a feature we've added to all four of our digital console lines.”
Integrated Recording Capability
Another advantage of digital consoles has been their increasing integration of multi-track recording systems, either through USB connections, which tend offer a smaller number of I/Os, or though networked connection, which can handle upwards of 64 channels simultaneously. In some cases, manufacturers have created proprietary ecosystems for multi-track recording, such as Roland's R-1000 48-track recorder/player that interfaces with its M-5000 console, with the content of hard drives downloadable to other DAWs. Most often, consoles will connect directly with software such as Avid's Pro Tools via CAT-5 cables, such as Digico's DigiGrid MGB interface.
While multi-track recordings of services and events are an important part of church content development, these recordings are also increasingly used as virtual sound checks, allowing engineers to refine the live sound of the church's live music. But they can also serve another critical mission: training. “You can have the volunteers run through an entire service and learn how to run the console using the actual sound from it,” says Larson. “It can also take some of the strain off the staff by letting the musicians and actors go home after a few rehearsals of an event or a pageant, and let the mixers continue to practice the moves.”
Palmer says integrated multi-track recording is now an integral part of Allen and Heath's onsite training for its HOW customers. “It's a big part of our commissioning process, and it's become a very useful way for churches to ease into digital,” he says.
But perhaps the single biggest change that the migration to a digital console affords churches is that now the hub of the audio system can now reside on a network as part of a larger integrated system. The arrival of Dante, the networking protocol with the largest market share in pro audio, and the establishment of the AES67 interoperability standard last year combined to create a plug-and-play networked environment that fairly easy to set up and use, linking all of an audio system's components into a single system. Tom Der, Soundcraft's U.S. brand manager, notes that digital snakes have become boon to the portable-church sector, that sees worship spaces needing to be packed up after services in temporary locations. “A single strand of Cat-5 or fiber cabling can carry all of the channels a church needs for a typical service,” he says.
“For instance, it can put the church's live sound and broadcast audio onto a single loop, or the live sound for multiple locations on a single network,” says Larson, who notes that Digico uses Opticore's fiber-based transport platform for that purpose, which can transport up to 504 channels of audio. “This is what is moving the house of worship towards the IT network paradigm.”
And that will likely be the model for the future for the house of worship. It may come somewhat later, as digital consoles did, than it's happening in the secular world, but in the long run it's inevitable. However, adds Michael Palmer, virtuality will have its limits in church. “I don't see us getting away from the surface-based workflow model, where you have a hands-on surface to work with,” he says. “But we will definitely see more digital in church, because as prices keep coming down, more churches will adopt it. It's truly digital for the masses now.”
