Home to a diverse music programme and a variety of special services, Calvary Baptist Church of Woodbridge, Virginia recently installed an Allen & Heath dLive C Class Digital Mixing System with C2500 Surface, CDM48 MixRack and two DX168 Expanders.
‘We had an Allen & Heath GL2800 analogue mixing console,’ says Ian Trumbore, a deacon and lead audio engineer at the church. ‘But we were maxing out the inputs and we couldn’t record things like the kids’ theatre like we wanted. I was constantly switching stuff around and physically patching things on the fly. So, we made the decision to go to a digital console that could meet our needs.’
John Pierce of Audio/Video Group in Frederick, Maryland, had mixed for the church at a local Christian radio station event. He did a site survey, analysed the church’s needs and installed Calvary’s dLive: ‘I recommended the dLive because of its sound quality and workflow and I knew it would simplify the transition from their existing analogue console.’
After outgrowing its original 1950s-era building, Calvary Baptist’s worship services now take place in its multi-purpose Family Life Center, which includes a formal stage with the CDM48 MixRack and one of the DX168 Expanders. ‘We have 40 to 50 sources on stage depending on the service, so this works out well,’ Trumbore says.
The second DX168, at the FOH position, accepts wireless mics, recorded tracks and other sources and the system is connected via Cat6 cabling using Allen & Heath gigaAce networking. A Waves card in the C2500 Surface enables multitrack recording on a Mac laptop. Trumbore, who mixes most of the church services, uses dLive’s layers to manage sources and makes extensive use of dLive show files to restore system configuration and mix settings after special events.
Trumbore recalls a pianist who needed her own stage monitor in a hurry: ‘I could now do that quickly since I didn’t have to patch a bunch of cables and move things around,’ he says. ‘The dLive has surpassed my expectations and, after we installed it, the musicians asked, “Man, did you do something else when you changed this? Because everything is so much clearer”.’
More: www.allen-heath.com
