Located in Peoria, Illinois the fast-growing First United Methodist Church (FUMC) recently turned to technology and IT services company Pearl Technology system upgrade spanning a video production studio, recording studio and podcast studio, as well as the church’s two sanctuaries. Noe complete, the resultant installation is centred on Allen & Heath’s dLive Digital Mixing and ME Personal Mixing systems.

The project began when FUMC called in Pearl Technology to discuss updating the ability of its existing system to record and live stream services, and explore new ways to create online content.

FUMC’s two main worship spaces include a traditional space with a full audio system, cameras, streaming and simple video presentation, and a second more contemporary space with the same features and an increased emphasis on the church praise band and video. The upgrade process gave FUMC the opportunity to bring separate production and streaming systems into one shared space for a more advanced audio and video capability.

‘The camera and presentations systems from both spaces were routed down to the newly constructed production and broadcast room,’ says Pearl Technology’s Senior VP of Audiovisual Technology, Jeremy Caldera. ‘This was done via HD-SDI over fibre and video IP transport. The audio used an upgrade to both sanctuary mixers and one larger console in the production and broadcast space. For this element we conducted a demonstration with the technical team at the church and selected dLive Allen & Heath mixing systems.’

The two main sanctuary spaces use the dLive C3500 and feed signals via Dante to the production and broadcast room housing a dLive S7000. dLive is Allen & Heath’s flagship mixing system, powered by a 96kHz XCVI 160×64 FPGA core which provides 128 input channels with full processing and 64 mix outputs with full processing per system. The worship centre and praise band, in conjunction with the C3500, tap into the Allen & Heath ME Personal Mixing System.

‘The new system design is so flexible,’ Caldera continues. ‘The adjacent recording and podcast studio also routes all video and audio into the production room and allows for real-time transport around the building with a live mix engineer for both video and audio. All of these systems create a worship experience for tens of thousands of people each week that are unable to attend services in person.’

‘Jeremy and the Pearl Technology team have put together an amazing system design that demonstrates the malleability of the dLive range and our personal monitoring solutions,’ says Allen & Heath USA Director of Marketing, Jeff Hawley. ‘As FUMC continues to grow and push the tech boundaries, it’ll be fun to see how they put the dLive and ME systems to great use. Thanks for choosing Allen & Heath and congrats on the win.’

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