Aviom A-16II Personal Mixers were recently installed at Arapaho Road Baptist Church in Garland, TX, allowing the church to overcome a variety of audio challenges.
Supplied by Dispersion Design, the new Aviom gear was part of a complete audio overhaul designed to cut down on stage crowding, volume and turnaround time between services so the house of worship can now hold both its traditional and contemporary services in its main 700-seat sanctuary.
Holding traditional and contemporary services in the sanctuary had been a major concern because the church’s schedule provided only 30 minutes between services.
Switching the audio setup between the two different service styles – which required a piano, choir and solo singers for the traditional service and a full worship band used for the contemporary service – would originally require two hours or more.
The previous analog system in the sanctuary made it nearly impossible to quickly reconfigure the equipment from one service to the other; and the church was forced to hold its services in two different locations on its premises.
With the Aviom A-16II Personal Mixers, up to 16 custom mix presets can be saved and recalled, allowing both the contemporary and traditional leaders, musicians and engineers to utilize the same stage and audio setup. This enabled the church to not only cut the turnaround time down to 20 minutes, but also helped organize some of that excess clutter.
“The Aviom Personal Mixers have proven to be the ideal solution for Arapaho Road Baptist Church,” says Luke Raymond, owner of Dispersion Design.
“Considering their small budget, they really recognize that the A-16II units provide significant improvement to their services – in terms of overall experience and simplification of both the contemporary and traditional setups.”
An overly cluttered stage was another challenge the church faced and took steps to cut down on the number of cables by installing Ace Backstage stage pockets around the stage with multiple XLR inputs and RJ45 jacks that hook to Aviom A-16D A-Net Distributors installed in the church’s amp room.
The pockets, which house all of the newly run Cat-5 cabling for the stage, make the musicians’ jobs easier by cutting down on the amount of gear they need to power on each day as well as making it easy to quickly change the stage setup.
The Aviom system also spurred the use of in-the-ear monitors for the musicians in the worship band, eliminating cable clutter and helping to significantly reduce the stage volume. The setup in the auditorium now features an Aviom Y1 A-Net Card installed in a Yamaha LS9-32 console, which sends mix feeds from front of house to the A16-D units.
“What the church found with the overall audio system was a far superior listening and playing experience than what they had ever had before,” says Raymond. “They were absolutely thrilled with what they were able to do. It was far beyond what they were previously able to do and what they had experienced with just a few stage wedges.”
Not unlike other houses of worship, Arapaho Road Baptist Church was faced with a technical team with limited expertise. The simplicity of the Aviom system takes a lot of pressure and responsibility off the engineers, allowing each performer to create a unique monitor mix that can be recalled for each service.
Prior to the installation only a few band members had used Aviom mixers and it wasn’t possible to schedule a full training session, but Raymond says the 30-minute overview Raymond provided was more than enough time for the musicians to pick up the process.
“As the band was setting up, I quickly routed the appropriate direct outputs on the console to the Aviom card, set some rough gains, and labeled their mixers,” says Raymond. “I looked up from the console and the band was jamming away happily. I didn’t get a single request or complaint from them all morning!”
