Berean Church in Lincoln, Nebraska worships in a modern 2400-seat auditorium well-equipped with lighting, video projection and audio systems including Allen & Heath dLive S Class digital mixers at both front of house and monitor positions.
Berean’s weekly worship services combine in-depth Bible study with a contemporary style worship that features a live band and praise singers along with an occasional adult choir or one of several youth groups. Berean also hosts regular concerts by Christian artists such as Jared Anderson, Casting Crowns, David Crowder and others.
Berean began its search for new front of house and monitor mixers after rejecting costly updates to its existing digital mixers. After a demo, the church purchased two dLive S7000 surfaces, a DM64 MixRack, a DM0 MixRack, a DX168 expander and a Waves card from Inspirmedia, a live-event production company in Lincoln.
Berean’s technical director Jon Sauer says, “We were impressed with the dLive’s ease of use and sound quality and it had the features we needed at a price that fit our budget.”
A typical Berean worship service has more than 40 sources including wired mics, direct sources, audio from video and computers and as many as 16 wireless mics. Sauer uses dLive layers and banks to organize and manage these sources and he uses dLive scenes to recall settings for individual worship songs. He uses the dLive’s 16T and Opto compressors and its Dyn8 dynamic processor, its reverbs, a doubler and a tap delay and sends a mix to the house system and to a stereo video recording. Sauer and tech team volunteers each maintain their own dLive show files allowing quick setups for each worship service or for special events.
To reduce stage clutter, Berean uses 16 wireless in-ear monitors with wedge monitors available when needed. Tech team volunteers manage these mixes on an S7000 at stage right supplemented by iPads with the dLive OneMix app. Monitor mixes may be enhanced by the dLive’s 16T compressor and reverbs. The DM64 MixRack serves the S7000 at monitors and acts as an audio splitter feeding all of its sources to the DM0 MixRack which serves the front of house S7000 surface via Allen & Heath’s gigaACE digital networking protocol.
Sauer says each engineer mixes one or two times each month and notes that, “Training has gone smoothly and we’re very pleased with the level of support.” He has received many complements on the improvement in sound quality and intelligibility. A worship musician commented, “Everything’s clear in my monitors. I feel more inspired.”
