Churches that rely on volunteers and people with little to no experience in production can benefit greatly from the communication, guidance, and especially the training that can happen in real time with intercoms. Often churches overlook the option as unnecessary or too expensive. But a German company called PunQtum is making affordable IP-based intercoms designed well for churches. Johnny Ragin is known on social media as the Worship Sound Guy. He's also the technical director at Stone Creek Church in Georgia, and he's been evaluating the PunQtum system in a worship environment.
The Punqtum Q Series Intercoms have received the Church Production Road Tested Certification.
“Stone Creek Church is here just north of Atlanta in the suburb of Milton. We do three services on a Sunday. Our receiving capacity in this auditorium is about 800, and our worship style is contemporary. We're a non-denominational church, so we kind of lean more in that direction,” Ragin says.
It's very much plug-and-play...
Punqtum is a company solely focused on bringing ease of use, clarity, and quality to just the intercom space. As part of our Church Production Road Test Experience, they sent Stone Creek Church a set of PunQtum Q1 10 belt packs and two Q2 10 speaker stations. Ragin says set up was a breeze. “It's pretty robustly built. It's got just a few inputs and outputs on it,” he explains. “It's very much plug-and-play, although you can get a lot more customized with it if you want to. Usually, with networking things, it's a lot more complex than that. You're dealing with entering a bunch of IP addresses and getting things to see each other on the network. And fortunately, this was so much easier than that. It just was so simple to plug in, play set up, and that was it.”
"I was expecting it to sound better. Honestly, I didn't expect it to sound so much better." — Johnny Ragin, Worship Sound Guy and Technical Director at Stone Creek Church
The Q2 10 speaker station is the main hub and also the brains behind the whole PunQtum intercom system. It's also accompanied by software to configure the system based specifically on an individual church’s team, as well as a mobile app that in some configurations can turn a smartphone into a belt pack.
“So, we had two of the Q2 10 base stations. We put one at front-of-house as a central hub where we could have audio lighting, a couple of camera operators, graphics, and media switcher. Those could all be on one base station. And then for the second one, we had that actually backstage so that we could talk with our green room and backstage techs,” Ragin explains. “In addition to that, you have some audio inputs and outputs. So, if you wanted to connect a console feed from your front house mixing board or monitor console to it, you could do that so you could pass that audio along to your packs and headsets as well.”
One thing that wowed the team right away was sound quality. “Audio quality was something I was very curious about, especially coming from a wireless solution. So, I was expecting it to sound better. Honestly, I didn't expect it to sound so much better. Literally, the first thing that a couple of my volunteers said was, ‘Wow, it sounds so good!’”
There are two options for the system. The Q2 10 P is a wired speaker station for the intercoms, but the Q2 10 PW adds wireless capabilities. Stand-out features for Stone Creek’s team were the ability to mute all the mics from the base station and the ability to set permissions for who can talk to whom. Ragin concludes, “I think the PunQtum Q Series intercom system is a really awesome step up for any small to mid-size to large church—anyone who wants to expand their current intercom system or even step up from not having an intercom system. I think at the price point it is really approachable for a lot of churches who want to get into a more robust system than they might currently have. PunQtum does a really great job at making it very easy to implement and also at a very approachable price point.”
