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Your sound console is the focal point of operation for your sound system. It plays a key role in the integrity of the sound heard over your speaker system. With that in mind, there are several issues that you should consider in order to put this tool to use.

Choosing a Console From a technical standpoint, the useful life expectancy of the console you purchase this week is six to ten years at best. Its growing repair costs coupled with improvements in console design will warrant purchasing a replacement unit within that time frame. It's also likely that your need for inputs and outputs will have grown beyond the capacity of that console, so it will be time for a change anyway.

There are over forty manufacturers of sound mixing consoles. Finding the right one for your needs can be a bewildering search. Here are six important steps to consider:

- Assess your current worship team needs.
- Project your worship team's growth needs over at least the next 5 to 8 years.
- Apply a realistic capital budget figure.
- Look for dealers with appropriate solutions who also have the capacity to make timely repairs.
- Do your homework, and then have fun making the purchase.
- Make a capital budget entry now to replace that console in 6 to 10 years at 150% of its current price.

Assessing Your Current Needs

Determining the number of input channels is reasonably straightforward. Consider your usual worship service. You already know from experience that in some auditoriums not all instruments on stage need to be miked in order to be heard.

Your sound system is primarily there to reinforce the acoustic energy already present on stage, so if an instrument can be heard clearly without a mic, you may be able to save the cost of that channel. Count up the number of vocalists you expect during a typical service, then add the number of musicians who need to be miked. Next, add all the lapel mics you have plus inputs for cassette decks and/or CD players.

Take into account the input needs of your biggest musical event of the year, perhaps your Christmas or Easter musical pageant. That should add up to the maximum number of channels you'll ever expect to use. Depending on the scale of your pageants, that could increase your input needs by as much as 30 percent.

Also, get your worship team and sound team together and talk through your production plans for the next five years. For many churches, that may be a difficult task in itself, but buying a console is a significant expense and it's definitely worth the time to do this exercise. Listen carefully to their brainstorming and use that information to make an informed guess regarding how many inputs you think are enough to do the job they're requesting of you.

Sure, you could supplement the lack of channels on a smaller console by adding an "extra" console for those specific events. But you may find it less expensive and less complicated in the long run to simply purchase the larger console now. At this point, you should have a rough idea of the size of console you should be looking for, at least in regards to the number of inputs.

Outputs

Another factor is how many outputs you'll need. The obvious one is the main output. If you'll be mixing the stage monitors from the house desk, then also be certain that you allow for enough auxiliary sends for those individual monitor mixes. Since most musicians and singers prefer that their monitor mix not change during the course of the worship service, look to see that the console you're considering has "prefade" auxiliary sends for those monitor mixes.

Many musicians and singers would prefer to have their own monitor mix, but that can be too expensive for many churches. If possible, provide at least two mixes, one for the vocalists and one for the musicians.

You'll also want "postfade" auxiliary sends to feed your effects processors so that you can easily add reverb and other effects to the overall house mix. I prefer at least two postfade aux sends for this application because I like to use different reverb settings for the vocals as compared to the music instruments. If I can get a third postfade send, I'll use it as a feed to a digital echo device to add a bit of echo as needed.

In general, the more auxiliary sends you can afford, the more fun you'll have in mixing, because it adds a tremendous amount of flexibility. The best of both worlds would be a PRE/POST switch on each monitor send, because then you could make each monitor send on each channel either a prefade send or a postfade send. Unfortunately, you'll find that kind of feature only on the very expensive consoles.

Consider it a mixing advantage to choose a console with submasters. I teach in my classes on console operation to always keep the fader (volume control) down on unused channels. The engineer can eliminate excessive stage noise and significantly improve the gain-before-feedback condition simply by turning off the unused channels during strategic moments. Submasters allow the engineer to easily drop those sounds out of the mix without upsetting the careful musical balance that he/she has created during the worship set. Submasters make those mix changes repeatable and easy to do.

Inexpensive consoles often have fixed frequency choices on each channel's equalizer section. That can pose a serious limitation to enhancing the tonal quality of a sound, because rarely are the frequencies chosen by the manufacturer precisely what the engineer needs to make an improvement in the sound. A console that has a sweepable midrange frequency control on each channel will provide the needed flexibility.

Budget Realities

Isn't it great that audio manufacturers have succeeded in bringing down the price of consoles over the years!?! So what do you buy - a 32 input console that costs $4,000, or a 32 input console that costs $40,000? Good question. Don't get me wrong - there's a marked difference in the quality of sound between two consoles with that wide of a price spread. If I had the budget, sure I'd spend the $40,000. In fact, I'd push for double that if possible. But there are a lot of 32 input consoles below the $15,000 mark that sound quite good, and have tremendous signal routing flexibility. I've installed a few of those $4,000 consoles that sounded and performed quite well. They made my system sound good, and they made my client happy.

What do you get for your money? Given the same number of mic inputs, as the price climbs you'll first start to see added flexibility. The signal flow diagram will blossom into a city map. You'll go from three or four auxiliary sends to six or eight. At first they'll probably be grouped as either prefade or postfade in groups of two or four. That's a limitation.

You'll also start to see submasters on the console. At first you'll see four submasters, then as the price climbs it will jump to eight.

Next you may start to see added switching. For example, you'll reach a point where you get that pre/post switch I mentioned earlier next to every auxiliary send pot. This is way cool. Go a little higher and you might even see a Mute switch next to every auxiliary send pot. Now, this is beyond cool. You could also find programmable mutes - a method of turning on or off a group of inputs, regardless of the subgroup they are assigned to.

While there are some exceptions in the lower-priced consoles, somewhere in the $20,000 to $30,000 range you may start to hear a difference in the consoles. Here the design intent grows beyond function to improving sound quality. Circuit design is approached differently. Much higher grade components are used, and the layout may become more critical.

If your budget has lasted this far, you might start seeing VCA subgroups. Let's imagine that you want to control all of the vocal mics with one submaster fader. With a standard submaster, the combined audio signal from all of those channels assigned to that submaster would flow through that submaster fader. From a functional standpoint, that's a bit of a limitation because the audio going through the individual channel faders is still there, even though you've dropped them from the house mix by pulling down the submaster.

One problem with this is the fact that, since the fader is still up, the audio is still passing on to the auxiliary sends; so if you're feeding a signal to an effects device on one or more of those channels (e.g., reverb for vocals!?!), your audience may hear your worship team ask with a great reverberant sound "What's for lunch?" while the pastor is reading the announcements.

With a VCA (Voltage Controlled Amplifier) approach, the audio doesn't actually flow through the faders. Instead, it goes through a VCA on each channel. The submaster faders also have no audio passing through them. Instead, they simply alter the control voltage that is fed to each of those channel VCA's. So when you pull down this type of VCA submaster, it actually does turn down the audio signal at each of those individual channels. That, in turn, drops the signal going to those aux sends and anywhere else it might be being fed to.

So how much should you spend? I can't tell you. Well, I could, but you might not like my answer. Consider that next to your speaker system (including the processing and amps that drive it), the house console is the next most important and significant investment you'll make toward your sound system's quality. Take your time, do your homework, and then have fun. You're going to be mixing on that desk for a long time. And be sure you establish a budget NOW for its replacement!

Curt Taipale is one of the foremost experts on church systems working today. Be sure to visit his excellent web site at http://www.churchsoundcheck.com. While there, you can also sign up for the Church Soundcheck listserve, which has been providing valuable advice to thousands of worship techs for several years.