The Good Shepherd Church in Bokjeong-dong, South Korea recently scaled up the audio system in its Glory Hall with an Allen & Heath Avantis mixing console and a set of ME-1 personal mixers for the praise team.

The 600-seat Glory Hall is Good Shepherd Church’s secondary chapel, mainly used for morning worship. Sunday services are also being held in the hall at present, with reduced capacity to allow worshippers to come together within the country’s social distancing rules.

As the previous digital console installed in the hall had begun to show its age and was struggling to accommodate growing channel counts, the church called on Allen & Heath distributor Sama Sound to take it on an upgrade to the 64-channel, 42-bus Avantis mixer, complete with dPack processing, and a GX4816 AudioRack for onstage I/O.

Another major change to the Glory Hall is the replacement of the praise band’s wedge monitor speakers with a compact, discreet ME personal mixing system. Connected to the Avantis via a ME-U hub, six ME-1 units allow the musicians to precisely tailor their own headphone mixes. ‘Thanks to the ME-1 personal mixers, the sound on stage is well managed, making mixing easier, and the performers are comfortable because the sound quality is very high and they are easy to operate,’ explains Kim Hyun-seok, leader of Good Shepherd Church’s audio team.

The decision to invest in Avantis was heavily influenced by the church’s experiences with Allen & Heath’s SQ series mixers, which were already installed in two of its spaces. An SQ-7 console manages audio in the 300-seat Vision Hall, a multi-purpose facility used for youth worship and Sunday schools.

‘The SQ interface is very intuitive and the sound quality is excellent,’ says Kim. ‘To be more specific, I would say that the resolution and sense of space are excellent. This is especially evident in the recording output.’

An SQ-6 has also been installed in the praise team’s rehearsal space in the church basement.

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