Cokesbury United Methodist Church in Knoxville, TN, has three locations as well as an online ministry that streams services on the web, with tech director Mischa Goldman recently choosing to implement several new Allen & Heath GLD-80 consoles.
The GLD consoles were chosen after an evaluation demo with several competitors that was provided by ML Sound, also of Knoxville, which has served as church’s audio consultant and contractor for more than a decade.
During the demo, Goldman and his team of engineers listened to the same audio track several times through an assortment of mixing consoles, with their backs turned. “We did a four-console shoot-out, and we all chose the GLD-80,” Goldman states, succinctly.
As a result, contemporary services at the church’s north campus are handed by two GLD-80s, one for front of house and the other for monitors, outfitted with a Dante card for networking. Mix engineers are also taking advantage of the i-Pad app to check sound levels throughout the sanctuary.
At the south campus, the sanctuary hosts more traditional services in a space that’s acoustically very “open,” with a thrust alter jutting out into the sanctuary. “Given this, the sound must be reinforced as opposed to replaced, it has to be amplified but transparent and not sound amplified,” Goldman says. “This is where the older congregation worships and they don’t like a loud sound; they’ll come up to you and say so. The GLD-80 processing really delivers an ideal curve on all the audio.”
The third Cokesbury church is a portable campus, hosted at a high school auditorium each Sunday, with the system needing to be assembled prior to services and then struck immediately afterward. “It’s just like doing sound for a road tour, but with a shorter amount of time.” Goldman notes. “We needed a console with a digital snake option, 48 channels of flexibility and processing that can happen on the fly; in other words, drag and drop what you need and forget the rest.”
“I felt like all these years I’ve been listening to our sound through a paper bag,” he adds. “We turned the GLD-80 on without any processing, and it was a whole new sound spectrum, It’s warmer with very clear articulation and the audio presence is very clean.”
“Allen & Heath has been embedded in our company for over two decades,” concludes Joe Hamilton of ML Sound. “I used their analog boards in the past, and they were always way above the other available mixers.”