Technology solutions provider Diversified has chosen Waves Commercial Audio solutions for a major A/V system technology upgrade at Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, where Waves’ CA1000 DSP Engine now serves worship services, both on-site and streamed online.
Serving the faith community through online services has been vital to the ministry of Second Presbyterian Church since the start of the pandemic, when in-person gatherings were suspended in Indiana. The church leadership realised that existing A/V equipment needed to be improved to provide higher-quality streamed broadcasts its 3,000-strong membership. Diversified was called in to provide a phased upgrade toward a more capable and robust broadcast system.
‘Our primary goal for the initial phase was to solve the church’s most pressing issues,’ says Diversified Director of Strategic Accounts for Houses of Worship, Tim Corder. ‘The church’s operators vary widely in skill levels, so we needed a straightforward, easily operated system that is also highly flexible and robust.’
Diversified installed the CA1000 DSP Engine to process the audio stream for the church’s YouTube channel. ‘To improve the quality of the weekly broadcast from the church’s audio consoles, we needed true brick-wall limiting and a solid mastering chain,’ he explains. ‘The Waves Commercial Audio engine provided both, in a set-and-forget kind of way that anyone at the church could use. This combination of seriously improved sound quality and complete ease of use were critical to the success of our work.’
Corder’s team fine-tuned one of the factory-installed Waves CA presets with their own settings. ‘We used the Waves CA1000 processor to master the broadcast chain, inserted in line between the console and the encoder feeding their web broadcast,’ he explains. ‘We started with one of the master streaming presets that came pre-installed in the CA1000 and adjusted the factory configuration a little bit to get it exactly how we wanted it. The Waves plug-ins in the custom preset chain are the Abbey Road TG Mastering Chain (the Live component), the L3-LL Multimaximizer, and the L2 Ultramaximizer.’
In addition to processing the broadcast stream, Diversified configured the CA1000 to manage other audio challenges in the sanctuary. ‘To further improve audio for the church’s in-person service we created a couple of channel processing strips within the CA1000 that included the Waves X-FDBK feedback elimination plug-in – these ring out two podium mics and get as much gain before feedback as possible’ Corder says. ‘We also created a playback processing strip using the Playlist Rider plug-in, to streamline the church’s audio playback from a computer in the system; this way, the church’s audio operators will easily get even, comfortable audio levels from diverse audio sources.’
The Diversified team quickly set up the CA1000 using an Dante network. ‘Since the Waves CA1000 unit has Dante connectivity natively onboard, it fit perfectly into the Yamaha Dante ecosystem we were creating on this project. The product is super-simple to use and integrate. Upon initial power up, it came right online as you would expect and was on and functional within a few minutes of configuration.
‘We love how simple it is to create problem-solving processing chains and insert them on console channel strips,’ Corder says. ‘Thanks to the factory presets, the plugins under the hood, the DSP engine capabilities and the Dante integration, this is the perfect solution for clients looking to improve their audio production.’
