California-based House of God Productions, a creative design and consulting firm focusing primarily on houses of worship in the U.S., recently upgraded the two campuses of Christian organization Jesus Culture with new production capabilities that include Allen & Heath dLive mixing systems.
“We design worship centers, sanctuaries, and even produce albums,” explains president and founder Justin Lusignan. “Our mission is to enable churches to express the truest form of themselves. We want to help them be the unique church that they are.”
House of God Production has been working for the past three years with the multifaceted Jesus Culture, which consists of a Christian record label, a school of leadership, a web video and podcast network as well as the two churches in California. “We help produce, record, and track their albums,” Lusignan explains. “We also manage the installation and consulting projects at all of the campuses. That can sometimes mean putting in new lights, or an LED wall, or new speakers, or a recording setup.”
The organization’s dual campuses in San Diego and Sacramento are now running identical mix systems, with 24-fader dLive C3500 control surfaces at front of house and CDM64 MixRacks for I/O and channel processing. The surfaces are also equipped with Dante cards to split off to the broadcast mix.
“We were looking at getting an external server to run plugins on their existing consoles,” he notes. “But once we factored in all the inserts and plugins that dLive has accessible natively, it eliminated the need for any external processing. We were kind of killing two birds with one stone by replacing their console with dLive: they got a much better and more up-to-date console, and also scratched that itch for more plugins and processing.”
For monitors, Lusignan’s team put in a pair of Allen & Heath SQ-7s with DX168 stage boxes for additional outputs. “The band is ecstatic about the improvement,” he says. “Their in-ear mixes have come through so much clearer, and they don’t need to set up drastic EQ curves to compensate anymore. It’s really fun when a client notices an immediate difference.”
Lusignan and his organization first took notice of Allen & Heath’s product line in 2020. “I saw some articles about the Avantis online, and it seemed a little too good to be true,” he states. “Then I ended up using one that belonged to a friend of mine, and was really impressed.” At another install, Lusignan brought along an Avantis to compare to the venue’s existing console. “I ran an A/B test to hear the difference with the same PA in the exact same room. It was crazy to hear the difference in clarity and how much more space there was to the sound.”
For a later upgrade at The Rock Church, Lusignan decided to spec an Avantis with a Dante card and several DT164-W Dante-enabled stage boxes for distributed I/O throughout the venue. “It was really cool how we could digitally split those same Dante inputs to their in-ear mixer, front of house console, and the broadcast mix – all right from the floor boxes,” he recounted. “It was super easy to integrate, and the client is still happy with it. It’s so simple and easy to use.”
