The missing piece in a livestream mix is not always clarity. Sometimes it is presence. Congregational singing, laughter and response are what help carry the life of the room into the livestream.
For church livestreams, one of the hardest things to capture is not always what happens on stage. It is what happens in the room.
The Shure DCA901 Broadcast Array Microphone has received the Church Production Road Tested Certification.
The congregation singing, laughing, responding and engaging with the service can make the difference between an online mix that feels connected and one that feels strangely detached from the life of the church. That challenge becomes even more difficult in rooms that were not designed first for broadcast audio.
The DCA901 gave Rolling Hills a way to steer audience pickup without physically moving microphones.
At Rolling Hills Community Church in Middle Tennessee, that reality is familiar. The church’s Franklin campus meets in a 1,000-seat auditorium inside a converted warehouse, with concrete floors, a steel ceiling, overhead air ducts and limited acoustic treatment. For Shaun Miller, central production director at Rolling Hills, capturing the sound of the congregation has become an important part of serving the church’s online campus.
The online campus is one of Rolling Hills’ largest campuses, and the production team wants viewers to feel connected to the service, not as if they are simply listening to a polished studio recording.
Rolling Hills recently demoed a pair of Shure DCA901 Broadcast Array Microphones as part of that effort. Designed for broadcast and immersive audience capture, the DCA901 uses a single array microphone to create multiple steerable pickup zones that can be aimed around a room through software. For a church trying to capture congregational response without filling the room with traditional audience microphones, that flexibility was a significant part of the appeal.
The technology mattered because it helped solve a ministry problem: making online worship feel connected to the room.
Rolling Hills tested the Shure DCA901 Broadcast Array Microphone as a steerable audience mic, ambient mic and congregation-capture solution for its livestream mix.
Miller says the microphones were placed near the front of the room, behind an air duct. At first, the placement raised an obvious concern: would the microphones pick up too much air noise? In practice, he says, they did not.
The primary use case was the livestream. Before the demo, Rolling Hills used shotgun microphones to capture some of the room, but there were still moments when the online mix could feel disconnected from what was happening in the auditorium. If the worship team pulled back and the congregation sang a bridge, the online audience did not always hear the room respond in a meaningful way, especially during services with lower attendance.
With the DCA901 microphones, the team was able to capture more of that congregational energy: people singing, laughing at the pastor’s jokes and responding to the service in real time. For Miller, that made the online experience feel more like participation and less like playback.
The setup process also changed how the team thought about audience capture. Instead of physically moving microphones to adjust coverage, the team could steer pickup zones through software. Miller describes using an airhorn app on his phone to walk through the room and map zones, allowing the system to identify locations and aim lobes where they were needed.
That software-based control opened up other possibilities as well. While Rolling Hills does not use a regular choir, Miller says his audio team discussed how the microphones could potentially serve that purpose. The ability to aim pickup areas without physically relocating microphones could make the technology useful in a variety of church production scenarios.
When audience capture works, viewers may not know what changed. They just feel more connected.
For Rolling Hills, the most immediate result was a more engaging online mix. Miller says viewers began commenting on how good the livestream sounded, even though most of them did not know what had changed.
That may be the real value of better room capture. When it is missing, the online experience can feel flat. When it is done well, people may not be able to identify the technology behind it, but they can feel the difference.
For churches with livestreams, broadcast campuses or online congregations, the question is not simply how to capture the band or the pastor more clearly. It is how to help people watching from somewhere else feel connected to the worship, response and life of the room.
