Canyon Hills Assembly of God Church in Bakersfield, California has become one of the world’s first houses of worship to adopt a new Soundcraft MH4 mixing console.

Pacific West Sound (PWS), a design-build contractor and production company also located in Bakersfield, installed the church’s 48-channel MH4 in May as part of a complete retrofit of the facility’s aging audio system.

Located up in the sanctuary’s wraparound balcony, the desk is being called upon to run both the front-of-house and monitor sound, the latter consisting of six mono mixes for floor monitors and four stereo mixes for in-ear monitors.

The new MH4 replaces a 32-channel Soundcraft 200B that the church outgrew as its needs for inputs increased. The 200B, which ran on the same power supply since it went in 15 years ago, has now been relegated to the youth room where it will continue to serve Canyon Hills.

“The MH4 is a great sounding board,” notes PWS president/owner Brent Milton. “Like all Soundcrafts, its mic pres are warm and the British EQ is very pleasing to the ear. The MH4’s layout is also extremely straightforward, which was certainly an important consideration. After a bit of training, everyone in the church’s audio department, including laypeople, easily understands how to program mute groups, utilize the VCAs and otherwise capably get around on the desk.

“The modular design of the MH4 was another big plus, as was the fact that it can dually serve as a front-of-house and monitor mixer. With 16 auxiliaries available, there’s no need for a dedicated monitor board. And certainly the church was very pleased with how well their other Soundcraft has held up over the years. All in all, the MH4 is a very cool console and, after seeing this one, I know we’ll be adding one to our own rental inventory soon.”

As part of the retrofit, PWS has just custom-built a new patchbay system comprised of seven patch panels to support all of the MH4’s and outboard racks’ I/O needs. Aside from the Soundcraft console and patchbay, Canyon Hills’ sanctuary will also soon benefit from the addition of Crown K Series amplification, supported with an IQ-USM 810 DSP engine, and EAW loudspeakers.

The new MH4 marks Soundcraft’s entry into the multipurpose live performance console market, as its design topology permits easy configuration for front-of-house, stage monitor or mixed FOH/monitor duties.

Available in 24, 32, 40, 48 and now 56 channel frame sizes – all with four stereo inputs as standard – the totally modular MH4 features 16 auxiliary busses, new mic amp and EQ designs, eight VCA and eight mute groups with snapshot automation, true LCR panning and outputs, an integral 20x8 matrix and integrated control over dbx DriveRack and BSS Audio Varicurve processing. In monitor mode, each input also has a passive mic split feed to connect to a FOH console.

The auxiliary busses are switched into the two modes of operation by a set of ‘global mode’ switches on the group-aux output masters. In FOH mode, there are twelve mono auxes and eight group busses with pan controls across each pair of group busses.

In monitor mode, there are eight mono sends and four stereo sends, which are most commonly used for in-ear monitoring feeds. On the outputs, the stereo sends benefit from four-band semi-parametric EQ.

For more info, go to Soundcraft.