Located in Knoxville, Tennessee, Cokesbury United Methodist Church is one church in three venues, as well as an online ministry that streams worship services on the web. As part of an audio upgrade, the church installed a total of four Allen & Heath GLD-80 mixers.
Two of the Church campuses have a contemporary style of service with singers, keyboards, bass, drums and percussion, piano, horns and a string section. The third campus delivers a traditional theological service with classic choir, piano, guitar, bass, brass, woodwinds and strings.
Charged with orchestrating the diverse audio demands of Cokesbury Church is Technical Director, Mischa Goldman.
“I’ve been in production for over fifteen years and have used ten different mixing consoles. The Allen & Heath processing is fantastic and the sonic quality of their consoles can’t be touched in this price range.” states Goldman. “However, my musical background is Classical and my FOH engineers come from Rock and Metal so we asked our audio contractor to arrange a shoot out for us.”
ML Sound of Knoxville, Tennessee has been Cokesbury Church’s audio consultant and contractor for over ten years.
“Allen & Heath has been embedded in our company for over two decades,” says Joe Hamilton of ML Sound. “I used their analogue boards in the past, those were always way above the other available mixers.
According to Hamilton and his ML Sound colleagues, in previous shoot outs the Allen & Heath GLD-80 had held its own sonically against more expensive brands. With their backs turned, Goldman and his team of FOH engineers listened to the same audio track over and over through four different mixing consoles, which resulted in everyone choosing the GLD-80. Once the testing phase was over, GLD-80s were installed in all three ministry locations.
“I felt like all these years I’ve been listening to our sound through a paper bag – we turned the GLD-80 on without any processing – it was a whole new sound spectrum,” explains Goldman. “It’s warmer with very clear articulation and the audio presence is very clean.”
At the north campus of Cokesbury Church, contemporary services are performed using two GLD-80’s, one for FOH and one for monitor mixing with a Dante card to manage the network. Additionally, there are Mackie 1400 amps powering EAW point source speakers, a dozen Shure ULX-S microphones and Sennheiser G3 in ear monitors. Both the FOH and Monitor engineers are using the GLD iPad app to check sound levels throughout the worship sanctuary.
“We are also doing all of our DSP in the GLD-80 console, a great advantage.” he adds.
