BroaMan Route66 Autorouters have been widely used on live events and in production/touring where a high redundancy and flexibility are required. Services held at Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, have similar needs – a consideration that has made the church home to the first Route66 in North America.

There are multiple connection points throughout the church space where mixing consoles and equipment are constantly placed depending on the service they are hosting on any given day, demanding a robust device that is easy to operate. Possible connection points include two FOH positions, monitors, the equipment room and a broadcast location with a Optocore DD4MR-FX Madi device. Any console, rack or piece of Optocore equipment could potentially be connected at any location without any network reprogramming required.

As their patch points come online, the Route66 senses newly attached units and connects them to the other locations so the system never loses redundancy. This happens automatically, no cueing of presets is required and no technician is required to manually re-patch any physical connections thus eliminating user error and the possibility of fibre connectors getting damaged or dirty. Using the Autorouter ensures that every channel in the network is always available at every location.

The same operators of Thomas Road Church have another production facility in the nearby Liberty University, which uses a passive fibre patchbay. As they were planning for the upgrade, Audio Systems Architect Mike Gerringer wanted to implement a system that was easier to use and more technical to match the renovations that were happening to the rest of the audio system.

‘With the passive system, a lot of thought  has to go into re-patching the system – remembering which locations we’re using and what connections those are,’ Gerringer says. ‘The Autorouter simplifies the day-to-day operation of the venue. We had looked into using a loopback system to connect every location at the same time but with the Autorouter we don’t have to disconnect cables if we aren’t using that location. If we aren’t using Monitors then we can just leave that console off. It also means that our part-time volunteers don’t need to worry that the consoles are plugged in correctly or how to use a patchbay.’

A large component of the church’s service is its broadcasts, having been recording services since its founding in 1956, when they were aired on local and national TV channels. Now an Optocore DD4MR-FX is used to feed Madi to an Avid S6L mixing surfave and Pro Tools system straight from the DiGiCo SD Racks and a Dante network. The DD4MR can support 128 Madi I/O at 48kHz sample rate networks, which gives extensive I/O.

‘The flexibility and the easy of use of the system is amazing,’ Gerringer comments. ‘The sound quality and warmth that we get now because of fibre is leaps and bounds above what we had before when we were using an analogue distribution system. We have lots of plans moving forward on how to expand to accommodate guest musicians and how to interface with our other campuses, and the new optical network means we aren’t limited by channel counts or cabling.’