Casey Batezel, technical director for Mill City Church in Ft Collins, Colorado, has selected the Pivitec e32 personal monitor mixers and wireless IEM’s to meet the needs of the growing congregation.
Founded in February 2012 as a nondenominational church plant by lead pastor Aaron Stern, the church has quickly grown to welcome 1,300 members at three services every Sunday at the University Center for the Arts, part of Colorado State University.
One of the challenges the church faces is that its main meeting room, Griffin Concert Hall, isn’t always available, so for several weeks at a time the congregation may need to meet in another venue in the facility. Add to that frequent off-site activities, and it becomes obvious Mill City’s audio system must be extremely versatile.
The unique requirements of a mobile church include equipment that is reliable and portable and lighting quick to set up, as well as versatile in ability to fill various venues, and implement stored settings for each.
“We want everything to look clean, be easy to use, and fast to setup. As a mobile church, these criteria are sometimes hard to meet. Every personal monitoring system we researched required an unimpressive entry-level digital console, a monitor engineer and separate console, or tons of CAT5 cables run around the stage. We wanted a system which could interface well with our DiGiCo SD9 console and be setup as fast as possible. We also needed the system to sound as high-quality as possible,” explains Batezel.
Furthermore, “Pivitec is a great solution for us because we’re able to leave everything securely racked up and go from completely packed up to fully operational in minutes,” says Batezel. “All we have to do is connect a CAT5 cable from front of house to our stage rack and hand each musician an iPad and wireless IEM receiver. I can customize streams to send to each musician and help monitor their mix from front of house. I also love not having to worry about labeling personal mixers anymore. I can digitally label all of the channels on one device and they’re automatically synced to all eight devices on our network.I love the AVB connectivity Pivitec gives us, the great stereo imaging, ease of use, familiarity of the iOS platform, and my truly wireless stage.”
The Digico SD9 is connected by MADI to a Pivitec e64i/o-MADI bridge, which is capable of 64 bidirectional channels, to an Extreme AVB enabled PoE switch. The e32 Mixers connect directly to the switch and are controlled wirelessly with Apple iPads running Pivitec’s V2Mix Pro app. An AVB-capable Mac computer can be connected directly to this system for recording and playback.
“I stand behind all of the technology we use at Mill City,” says Batezel,“but I brag the most about Pivitec because of their incredible tech support. At every level of the process I was connected personally to the engineering and sales teams at Pivitec, and they personally helped me get the most from our purchase. I can’t recommend this company enough.”
