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Blackhawk Audio recently supplied Nashville Life with a new DiGiCo Quantum225 console equipped with a DMI-KLANG card, plus 12 KLANG:kontrollers on stage. (Photo Credit: Risha Chesterfield)

DiGiCo Quantum225 Is The Right Fit For Nashville Life Church’s New Home

Console handling both FOH and monitors joined by four Dante-enabled A168D stage boxes along with a DQ-Rack for switching and patching.

Nashville Life, a ministry founded by gospel artist and 15-time Grammy Award-winner CeCe Winans and her husband Alvin Love II, is located in a newly renovated former church building in the Tennessee city’s Nolensville Road neighborhood that’s equipped with a sound reinforcement system headed by a DiGiCo Quantum225 console joined by four Dante-enabled A168D stage boxes along with a DQ-Rack in the amp room for switching and patching.

The entire system is on a Dante network, as are the church’s new EAW KF810 line arrays. In addition, a dozen KLANG:kontrollers, six connected to Shure PSM 1000 IEMs and six hard-wired IEMs for the band members, provide the church’s musicians and vocalists with customizable monitoring

Nashville Life is volunteer-driven, including Trey Smith, the church’s most experienced live sound mix engineer and one of three whose technical capabilities range from expert to ambitious. “That’s why the Quantum225 was such a good choice for the church,” he says of the new 350-plus-seat auditorium, which opened this spring with the new DiGiCo console and DQ-Rack, KLANG monitoring, and EAW arrays installed by locally-based Blackhawk Audio. “For those of us with experience in touring, we’re already familiar with DiGiCo, and if not, it’s such an intuitive, logically laid out console to learn. I was able to set the console up so virtually any user could walk up and start mixing — it’s that easy.”

The Quantum225 is handling the entire audio workload, front of house as well as monitors — with the 12 KLANG:kontrollers are connected via direct output from the console through a DMI-KLANG expansion card that supports up to 64 input channels– to a separate bus mix for the church’s streaming audio. “It sounds complicated, and the console is maxed out,” says Smith, who also tours as the FOH engineer for country star Thomas Rhett, “but the Quantum225 handles it all and is still simple for anyone to operate. We have various instrument and vocal preset channels for whatever is needed each week. Everything is clearly laid out and ready to go.”

Rick Shimer, president of Blackhawk Audio, adds, “This was the first time we’ve had DiGiCo on a Dante network through a DMI card, and the amount of flexibility is insane. The Quantum console is handling four 16-channel A168Ds, a 48-channel DQ-Rack, 16 channels of stereo KLANG mixes, plus subgroups. It’s an amazing amount of I/O and it’s not even breaking a sweat.”

Smith says that he has also been integrating the Quantum Series desk’s Mustard processing into the mix. “I’m using it for group processing, as well as applying it to instruments like the drums, bass, and vocal mics, using Mustard’s unique compression and EQ to give them their own sound and color,” he explains. “DiGiCos are very transparent, so when you apply the Mustard processing, you can really hear what’s happening.”

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