Custer Road United Methodist Church of Plano, Texas recently completed installation of Allen & Heath dLive digital mixing systems at front of house in their main sanctuary, as well as broadcast and recording throughout the church. The two mixers are part of a major renovation that will soon include a third dLive in a new contemporary worship space.
Jim Carter, director of AV and IT, manages the church’s tech team. Carter worked closely with volunteer Bill Kistler, a senior associate at WJHW Consulting in Dallas on the design for the new worship space. “For that venue with its contemporary music, we wanted a digital board,” says Carter. After considering several options, the team chose the dLive platform and purchased their new mixers from Sound Productions of Irving, Texas.
In the sanctuary, an S Class S7000 surface with a C Class CDM64 MixRack mixes front of house for the church’s large orchestra, several choirs and instrumental ensembles, youth and holiday programs and frequent outside events.
An S5000 with a Dante expansion card mixes broadcast and recording and acts as a hub for all wireless inputs. Custer Road operates its sanctuary CDM64 in multi-surface mode, allowing the broadcast surface to access the sanctuary’s MixRack through the church’s fiber network. This allows recording and broadcast of worship services and other events from either venue.
Another S5000 surface with CDM32 MixRack will mix front of house for the church’s contemporary worship space and eight Allen & Heath ME-1 personal mixers with an ME-U Hub will provide personal monitoring for musicians.
Carter set up a dLive show file for each of the church’s Holy Week services. And, he’s excited about the dLive’s built-in, advanced signal processing. “I’ll never need artificial reverb in the sanctuary because it’s purposely reverberant for our large pipe organ, choirs and orchestra,” he says. “But, dLive reverb and other effects can be used for our streaming broadcast. And, the dLive gates and compression have already made a world of difference.”
Custer Road’s tech team was impressed with the ease of migration from their previous analog environment and was able to install their new dLives in a single week. “The dLive’s workflow is very adaptable, and the system has obviously been built with the end-user in mind,” says volunteer Chris Gebhardt.
Carter comments, “The ability to use dLive scenes to help manage settings changes across our range of services and programs gives us the confidence that we can do big things in the future. And, the dLive is so flexible and scalable that we could add another one in our youth worship space and integrate that into our system. I’m really excited about what the dLive will help us do in the future.”
