Fairfield’s Mount Calvary Baptist Church has been serving Northern California as a house of worship since 1962. Fifty years on, in 2022, the church had maxed out its outdated audio console’s processing capabilities and approached Sacramento Production Services for help.
‘They wanted a new system that offered personal monitor mixing for the band, and multitrack recording capabilities,’ recalls Sales & Production Manager, Keith Wackford. ‘They also run a lot of wireless, but with very little personnel to actually monitor and adjust it – so telemetry and control of wireless devices from the front of house console was crucial.’
After some research, Wackford’s team alighted on an Allen & Heath dLive S7000 36-fader control surface, paired with a CDM48 MixRack as their preferred option. A 128-channel Waves card was added for multitrack recording purposes, allowing the church to capture and re-mix any performances using the isolated tracks. The set-up also makes tuning the room before a performance a simple task, using dLive’s dedicated Virtual Soundcheck mode.
A 128-channel Dante module was also included, which is used to interface with the church’s various Shure wireless devices. The dLive’s Shure and Sennheiser wireless integration feature enables the FOH engineer to monitor battery life of wireless microphones, as well as adjust input gains and view metering remotely – without having to be near the actual receivers. In addition, the Dante module distributes audio throughout the facility via a Dante-enabled audio matrix processor.
For personal monitoring, Wackford included a 10-port Allen & Heath ME-U hub, which can receive signal from the church’s dLive mixrack and feed that audio to seven ME-1 personal monitor mixers, along with channel names and stereo link information. The ME-U also provides PoE along the same data cables, which eliminates the need for individual power supplies to each ME-1 mixer.
‘We were quite impressed with how easily the band took to the ME-1s, after previously using a different system,’ Wackford says. ‘It was really nice, since it didn’t require much input from us as installers or from the main engineer.’
The stage was also expanded during the audio upgrade, so a DX168 16-input, 8-output stagebox was added to reduce overall cable runs to the main CDM48 MixRack. ‘Being able to run Cat5e through a floor pocket closer to where the band was made it much easier without having to create a whole panel or wall plate,’ Wackford says.
‘For churches that don’t know where they are going to be four, five, ten years down the road, expandability is crucial,’ he continues. ‘You may only have 32 mic preamps in your MixRack, but someday you may need 64 or 128. With dLive it’s just a matter of adding another DX stagebox. You may even want to add a separate recording or broadcast desk, all that takes is a gigaAce card and you can easily share audio without needing to rely on a third-party protocol. It’s huge for us, and it’s huge for our clients, too.’
