The 1600-seat worship sanctuary on the main campus of Istrouma Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, LA recently received an sound reinforcement system upgrade implemented by locally based production design company Pink Palace Media (PPM) that has a new digital front-end incorporating an Allen & Heath dLive S7000 mix surface working with legacy EAW loudspeakers in a left-center-right configuration.
Further, to better support the church’s live streaming needs, a dLive C3500 surface made its way into the broadcast control room. The project, headed up by PPM founder and principal Blaine Wilkins, also includes Allen & Heath dLive DM64 and S Class DM0 MixRacks. Helping to integrate the dLive components into a wider range of live and broadcast scenarios, 128 x 128 gigaAce and Dante cards provide a number of networking options while remote I/O capabilities were enhanced with the help of a pair of DX168 expanders from Allen & Heath.
Monitoring wasn’t overlooked in the refresh either: With a Livemix MIX-32 hub from Digital Audio Labs working in conjunction with 16 Livemix CS-DUO personal mixers (each of which is capable of delivering two separate mixes), performers onstage now have the opportunity to develop their own 24-channel mixes complete with EQ, compression, and reverb.
“As things went together, the DM0 became a super-unique piece in the whole puzzle,” Wilkins explains. “It acts as the central hub for all the networking components, housing Dante, gigaAce, and Waves V3 cards, plus expansion slots, all of which can be utilized across the entire dLive platform. The DM0 resides under the stage, along with the DM64 and Livemix MIX-32 hub, which also speaks Dante. One of the DX168 expanders is at the front of house mix position driving wireless mic operations, the other is at hand as a backup for when the need arises to expand onstage.”
Greg Ziecker serves as production director at Istrouma Baptist, while Parker Wales is the church’s production associate. “Greg brings a lot of experience to his role, especially in broadcast, having served with ESPN,” Wales notes. “After we developed a clear picture of where we wanted to go with this upgrade Blaine Wilkins was the one that translated our vision into reality. We can run the full gamut of Allen & Heath plugins at FOH plus everything Waves V3 has to offer. We have virtual soundcheck functionality, plus the capability to make multitrack recordings. As for the sound itself, the fidelity of our processing has hit another level entirely. Combined with the flexibility of our user interface and its-ease-of-use, we really couldn’t have asked for anything more.”
