Set in New Port Richey, Florida, is St Verena is a Coptic Orthodox church that worships in a, new 600-seat sanctuary. Equipped with an Allen & Heath dLive digital mixing system, control from a custom iPad touchscreen simplifies the church’s audio operations.

The system was installed by Christian Sound Installations, whose owner Paul Garner says: ‘St Verena was one of the most unique installations we’ve done at CSI. The church has multiple altars for different parts of the worship service and a group of singing deacons. We needed 42 inputs and multiple floor pockets because they constantly move their microphones. But the church told me, “We don’t want a mixer out there”, so we had to innovate to meet their needs.’

CSI teamed up with Aurora Multimedia on St Verena’s touchscreen control system, which uses an Apple iPad operating in kiosk mode and mounted on the wall in an alcove. An Aurora Multimedia QXP-2 embedded Linux Control Server acts as intermediary, feeding a custom control screen to the iPad and communicating with the church’s dLive DM48 MixRack via Midi. A Microsoft Surface Pro computer, installed in the equipment rack, runs Allen & Heath’s dLive Director software, giving full control of the dLive for set-up, commissioning and any future system changes or updates.

Garner used dLive scenes and DCAs to make it possible for the church to operate their sanctuary system, chapel system or both from the same screen: ‘When a mic is moved from one altar to another, they never have to change anything on the mixer. It is a really neat system and it has been working flawlessly.’
The Coptic Orthodox Pope visited St Verena for its opening, and complimented the church on their ‘robust and good’ audio system: ‘Our job as a professional integration company is to give our customers the technology they need and make it easy for them to operate,’ Garner comments. ‘For St Verena, the Allen & Heath dLive was by far the smartest thing we could have done.’

More: www.allen-heath.com