An extensive A/V upgrade of its key performance and worship spaces has seen Northern Beaches Christian School (NBCS) In Sydney, Australia install Allen & Heath dLive mixing system in its Marina Pryor Centre for the Performing Arts (MPC) and CITY indoor/outdoor meeting space.

Each venue has a capacity of 800, and hosts to a programme of student assemblies, worship services, musicals, concerts and celebrations.

‘There were major differences between the MPC and CITY infrastructure and gear and the complex systems required significant manoeuvring and set-up times,’ explains the school’s General Manager, Alan Schutz.

‘For NBCS, what is unchanged is the usage for diverse live music, playback and speech. We required a long-term cost-effective solution that continues to be inspiring and ultra-flexible. Given students are users of the systems, all components have to be super user-friendly.

‘The MPC systems were designed in 2009 and the CITY systems in 2012,’ he adds. ‘Technology has forged ahead and some of our needs have changed since that time. The age of some components was apparent in the difficulty of operation.

NBCS called in production and installation specialist, Production by Design (PxD), to help specify a flexible solution to mewt all its requirements. PxD Project Manager Chad Keating recommended the dLive system, installing DM32 MixRacks in both venues, fitted with Dante cards for integration with a Dante network carrying audio and video throughout the school. Everyday activities such as assemblies can be easily managed from iPads running the dLive MixPad app, or via GPIO connection to a Q-SYS system, which was chosen as the end user interface for basic room control across campus.

For more complex events, NBCS has invested in dLive S5000 and C1500 Surfaces that can be deployed in either venue, or used together to manage the largest shows, sharing the same DM32 over Allen & Heath’s gigaAce protocol. The system’s flexibility is further enhanced by two DX168 portable IO expanders and a ME personal mixing system comprising a ME-U hub and six ME-500 personal mixers, all of which live in portable racks, ready to serve wherever needed.

‘Moving to dLive has given NBCS the flexibility it needed and has cut setup time for an end-of-year event from a day and a half for an eight-person student crew to just two hours for a single staff member,’ says Keating. ‘The enhanced audio quality is immediately noticeable too – even for basic assemblies, and dLive’s user-friendly interface allows the students to achieve outstanding results with the system.’