Church

ICF Church Dives into dLive

Posted on June 14, 2021 by ProSoundNetwork Editorial Staff

Munich's ICF Church sets up and tears down its audio gear every week, including an Allen & Heath dLive system. — Munich’s ICF Church sets up and tears down its audio gear every week, including an Allen & Heath dLive system.

Munich, Germany (June 14, 2021)—With the amount of cutting-edge AV technology being used in modern houses of worship, sometimes it’s almost like going to church in a nightclub. For International Christian Fellowship parishioners in Munich, however, that’s exactly where they go to worship, as their Sunday services are held at Neuraum, a 2,400-capacity nightclub. That, in turn means that the church’s production team loads-in and tears down its system every week, including an Allen & Heath dLive system in use since the beginning of 2019.

Marc Deisen, ICF Munich’s head of audio, noted, “Since we set up and tear down every Sunday, we needed a lightweight and flexible system; we also wanted a straightforward and intuitive control surface.” As a result, the team employs a dLive S5000 Surface and a DM48 MixRack, chosen for their analog-like signal flow. Additional onstage I/O is provided by a pair of daisy-chained DX168s, and a 128-channel Dante card provides digital I/O for wireless microphones, virtual soundchecks and general audio distribution throughout the venue.

The ICF Munich setup is often moved to larger venues for the major Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter. For last year’s Christmas Celebrations, they moved to the Munich Showpalast. Due to the distance between the stage and the mixing position, two fibreACE cards were deployed to provide a secure fiber optic connection between the DM48 and the S5000 at FOH. “The fibreACE expansion cards were plug and play, and in general the dLive system has always performed solidly,” reports Deisen.

Remote-Mixing an Event 1,400 Miles Away

Going by the recommendation of the Munich team, another International Christian Fellowship branch—ICF Herrenberg—opted for a similar setup in 2020, partnering an Allen & Heath dLive C3500 Surface at FOH with a CDM48 MixRack onstage. “As a test setup, we had been given an Allen & Heath Avantis in addition to the dLive, but we needed 10 stereo in-ear mixes for the band, various subgroups and three more aux paths for the stream, as well as a matrix. The Avantis is a great console, but due to the amount of output paths, we finally decided on the dLive,” explains head of audio Phillipp Reineboth.

As in Munich, the services at ICF Herrenberg are supervised by volunteers from the congregation, most of whom do not have a professional technical background. “I wanted to provide our audio team with a well-configured setup that can also be operated by lay people,” Reineboth said. Accordingly, ICF Herrenberg chose a dLive C3500 system based on positive feedback from ICF Munich.

Allen & Heath • www.allen-heath.com

World News

12Stone Church Turns to Royer

Posted on September 23, 2020 by ProSoundNetwork Editorial Staff

(left to right): Dennis Frazier and Russell Allen of 12Stone Church.

Northeast, GA (September 22, 2020)—12Stone Church may have eight locations across three counties in Georgia, but it also reaches more than 20,000 people through its digital ministry. With the pandemic making streamed services more popular (and necessary) than ever before, the church recently integrated some of its studio gear into its streaming setup, resulting in a number of Royer microphones being employed to ensure everything was captured properly.

The church has been using a variety of Royer microphones for over 10 years, originally for studio and live event production. Russell Allen, worship development pastor/music director and audio director Dennis Frazier oversee the various aspects of the church’s audio production. They’ve acquired R-121s, R-10s, R-122s, and an SF-24 Stereo Ribbon microphone over time.

Choir Connects with Royer Ribbons

According to Allen, “We’ve had these mics for a good 10 years or so, but we really zoned into the R-121s and R-10s on the guitar cabs as recently as four years ago. Services are very contemporary in nature. We have eight campuses with a full 8-10 person live band/vocal team. There are typically three to five front line vocalists and a five-person backline (drums, bass, keys, and two guitars). We typically program a three-song set list (same songs at each campus) per weekend.”

When the pandemic came along, Frazier noted, “We had so much success in the studio with the R-121s on our stereo guitar rigs that we decided to go completely stereo for our live broadcast using all R-121s as well. Think about it, with COVID moving every church 100% online – now every person’s listening experience was immediately put under the microscope of a more ‘studio’ and ‘unforgiving’ environment. You must manufacture space, and reverb, and delay, and EQ to fill frequency space that otherwise gets lost in the room depending on the size and treatment of the space. We were so pleased with the real and raw sounds from our guitar world with the R-121s that it really helped shape our mix philosophy for our online expression. We are a guitar-forward modern rock worship culture and the R-121s help us capture the uniqueness of our sources in the purest and truest way.”

12Stone Church • https://12stone.com

Royer Labs • www.royerlabs.com.

World News

Winnipeg Church Revamps with Renkus-Heinz

Posted on July 12, 2020 by ProSoundNetwork Editorial Staff

Winnipeg’s Fort Garry Mennonite Brethren Church recently got a new audio system based around Renkus-Heinz IClive X loudspeakers.

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (July 13, 2020)—Winnipeg’s Fort Garry Mennonite Brethren Church is a 300-seat, A-frame worship facility, and while it’s a contemporary faith community, its audio system was decidedly not contemporary, unable to provide consistent coverage down the length of the room. With that in mind, the church brought in integrator Myron Dyck of Golden West Sound Design to reinvent its entire AV system, and Dyck in turn brought in a Renkus-Heinz IClive X PA.

Renkus-Heinz Debuts Iconyx Compact Series

“The church wanted a cutting-edge system, from audio to video,” said Dykc. “What we installed encompasses everything from IP video distribution and projection, stage lighting and acoustical treatment, and the absolute best sound possible. So, that meant going with Renkus-Heinz.”

The church incorporates a modern band into its services and the lack of clear coverage in the existing system made intelligibility a top priority when it came to designing the next audio set up. Dyck decided Renkus-Heinz digitally steerable arrays would be an appropriate solution. “I knew this would be a Renkus-Heinz install from the start,” Dyck said. For the Winnipeg installation, Dyck installed two ICLive XL loudspeakers and two ICLive X loudspeakers in matching arrays at the front of the hall.

“Everything about it is excellent,” Dyck said. “It was relatively easy to hang and install up against the ceiling using custom made mounts, and we had perfect coverage immediately. Everyone is extremely happy with the end result.”

Renkus-Heinz • www.renkus-heinz.com

World News

Newhope Church Livestreams with Waves

Posted on July 8, 2020 by ProSoundNetwork Editorial Staff

Dave Bookhout, director of Creative Arts & Worship of Newhope Church in Durham, NC, with the church’s Waves eMotion LV1 Live Mixer.

Durham, NC (July 8, 2020)—Under the COVID-19 pandemic, many houses of worship have turned to livestreaming to continue reaching their communities. Creating a fulfilling worship experience for viewers online is no simple task, as Dave Bookhout, director of Creative Arts & Worship of Newhope Church in Durham, North Carolina, has seen in recent times. While the church has livestreamed since before the health crisis, Bookhout has been using a variety of technologies, including a Waves eMotion LV1 Live Mixer and Waves plug-ins, to stream the church’s services and ensure they sound as intended.

“We’ve been broadcasting our services from our six campuses (Durham, Garner, Hillsborough, Wake Forest, Sanford, Kenya, and iCampus) for a while now, but since COVID, it’s become the most important thing we do on a weekly basis,” said Bookhout. “Sometimes we broadcast live using the eMotion LV1, and at other times we pre-record and then mix and master the broadcast using Logic, with all the same Waves plug-ins that we use on the LV1. Week in and week out, we use the Waves eMotion LV1 live mixer in our broadcast suite.”

Waves Launches FIT Controller for eMotion LV1 Live Mixer

“We are running four Dell TouchScreen monitors in our setup,” Bookhout says about the church’s system; “Our DiGiGrid MGO optical MADI interface transports 128 channels between two MADI cards in our Midas Neutron and the Waves SoundGrid network. We have a Waves SoundGrid Extreme Server to handle the plug-in processing; we have almost every Waves plug-in in our arsenal, and we are using many of them at any given time, so a powerful server is crucial. We also have a DiGiGrid IOC audio interface in our broadcast suite functioning as the LV1’s local I/O to transport audio to our studio monitors. We run 48 channels of the Waves SuperRack at front-of-house, using a Midas Pro X console, all I/Os being shared with the broadcast suite. So, we have 128 channels going on/off the Waves SoundGrid network, and the broadcast suite uses 72 channels while FOH has access to 48. We also utilize the SoundGrid Driver with a DAW for virtual sound check at both FOH and for broadcast, to get everything dialed in between our rehearsals and Sunday morning. That’s invaluable for us.”

On choosing the LV1 for streaming, Bookhout says, “We were already running SoundGrid through our Midas console at FOH, so adding LV1 for broadcast was a no-brainer. Also, the ability to run Waves plug-ins on every channel as well as on the master gives us every tool needed to create an incredible mix. When broadcasting to Facebook and YouTube, mastering is ultra-important, and we are able to achieve great results that we were only able to hear previously when mastering in a DAW.”

He sums it up: “Adding eMotion LV1 into our streaming/broadcast workflow has greatly improved our mix quality. Having the ability to drop any Waves plug-in on any channel at any time is powerful. When people tune in to our online broadcast, there is nothing more important than the mix. It doesn’t matter how good our video is; if the audio is sub-par, people will quickly leave and watch something else. Waves gives us every tool we need to build the best online streaming mix possible, which allows us to create incredible worship experiences, week in and week out.”

Waves • www.waves.com

Login

Register