With nine campuses and more than 5,000 worshipers in weekly on-campus attendance – along with an estimated 4,000 additional online – Nashville’s Brentwood Baptist Church has come a long way since being founded on Easter Sunday in 1969. The current main campus’ church was built in 2002 and had a few updates along the way, and recently completed a refresh of the sanctuary’s audio, video and lighting systems.
Working with AVL systems integrator Diversified, this included the adoption of immersive in-ear mixing using a Klang:konductor processor.
‘We had a few periodic updates to the systems over the years, such as going from analogue to digital audio and upgrading our video to HD, but it was mostly untouched since the beginning,’ says Brentwood Baptist Technical Services Director, Darby Gilmore. ‘We were not only due for a technical refresh but an aesthetic one, too. We wanted to modernise, and the Klang:konductor was part of that.’
Tim Corder, Diversified’s Vice President of Faith & Performance, brought the Klang:konductor to the church’s attention, seeing it as a solution that fit the church’s situation perfectly: ‘Brentwood Baptist has a very diverse, multi-generational worship style,’ he says. ‘It can be a challenge to adapt a sound system for that kind of diversity – one that also has a very high input-channel count – as well as a challenge to find console combinations that support a large number of stereo mix buses. Further, as a church that relies on a lot of volunteers, there may be a very wide range of abilities managing all those mixes.
To clam any reservations the church committees might have had over implementing new technologies in a church this large, Corder specified that the Apple iPad employed as the user interface with the Klang:konductor be hardwired for PoE, to assure uninterrupted power and broadband connectivity for every use.
The Klang:konductor is paired with Lawo mc236 MkII mixing consoles at front of house and monitors. ‘The console has several 64x64-input Madi interfaces and we’re using two of them for a 128x128 input matrix,’ Gilmore explains.
That same large musician and vocalist complement also argued for the Klang:konductor. ‘At first we looked at the cost of an additional console for monitors and the staffing cost of a dedicated monitor engineer, and tossed around the idea of using a pair of Klang:konductors instead,’ Gilmore continues. ‘However, the vocal team preferred having the personal touch of a monitor engineer, so we decided to go with a console and a Klang:konductor; we can use the Klang alone for the backline on smaller events and use both for full services. That way, everyone has the benefit of the Klang’s audio quality and it gives us tremendous flexibility in terms of how we allocate our monitor resources. That was a huge benefit of going with Klang.’
He also points out that the Klang:konductor’s interface with the console is straightforward and effective. ‘We can’t control the Klang:konductor directly from the desk; instead we use a VNC remote-desktop connection to a computer running Klang:app, which gives us control access from the console through that interface. We also have access to Klang:app via a number of KVM remote stations, including FOH, so we have a high degree of submixing control and a ton of routing options. Diversified suggested that and it’s working flawlessly. Everybody’s happy.’
