Fairview Baptist Church, a rapidly growing church in Corryton, Tennessee, recently upgraded its audio with three Allen & Heath dLive digital mixing systems and an integrated ME personal monitoring system.
Jeremy Cummings, Fairview Baptist’s media and technical director, describes the church’s needs analysis, “We had exceeded the space on the old mixer, we had audio quality problems, and routing issues that consistently came up. Also, we wanted to upgrade the audio experience for live streaming to allow people from all over to not just watch our services but to be immersed in our church’s worship gatherings.”
Cummings evaluated several mixers but says, “We knew it would be easy to train our volunteers on the dLive. And, the sound is just night and day. The dLive blew the others away.”
Emmaus Media & Design of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania installed the Allen & Heath systems and trained Fairview Baptist’s tech crew. A dLive S Class S7000 surface, DM48 MixRack and DX32 expander provides front of house mixing in the church sanctuary. A dLive C Class C3500 surface and CDM48 MixRack serve its student center. And, a C3500 surface with CDM32 MixRack mixes live streaming and audio for video in the church’s broadcast booth.
Emmaus’ Tim James explains the choice of both dLive S Class and C Class, “The S Class for front of house with C Class consoles for the student center and broadcast gave the church the functionality and sound quality they needed at a price they could afford now, with plenty of expandability for the future. They’ll be more than ready for the planned new building in a year or two.”
The dLive systems share sources and control information over a CAT6 network via gigaACE cards and all three are equipped with Waves cards connected to Waves SoundGrid servers. An experienced audio engineer and Waves fan, Cummings also uses the dLive’s onboard EQ, compression and reverbs and said, “It’s nice to have all of those great on-board effects with zero latency. You really have all the tools you need within the dLive system.”
dLive scenes and layers help Fairview Baptist coordinate its audio mix for the church’s several praise teams, its 100+ person choir, its frequent special events and its Easter and Christmas dramas. “We’ve had nothing but compliments on the sound from our members and special guests,” he said. “And many outside groups we bring in are leaving their PA and console in the bus when they find out we have a dLive.”
In the past, Fairview Baptist used stage monitor loudspeakers and Cummings notes, “We had a lot of stage volume previously so I wanted to go to all in-ears for the band and the praise team. Now, with the dLive, we have enough mixes and outputs to do all of that.” The church added seven Allen & Heath ME-1 personal mixers and an ME-U Hub for its band to allow each musician to customize their own in-ear mix. “The ME’s have just been great.”
Cummings comments, “The dLives and the ME’s have taken our attention away from ‘is the audio working or not?’ and put our attention on just enhancing the worship gathering. Now, we can just sit back and let worship happen. They’ve really changed the game for us.”
