Crossgates is a Southern Baptist church located in Brandon, Mississippi.
With an active congregation of around 4,000, it falls squarely into the ‘mega-church’ category and hosts at least four services per week in addition to making its facilities available to the local community.
Like other worship facilities all across the country, Crossgates was forced to make technical accommodations to comply with the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) recent ruling on the 700 MHz bandwidth issue.
Crossgates’ worship services—all of which occur in the facility’s ‘fan shaped’ main sactuary—are ‘non-traditional’ and combine ministry with a broad range of contemporary music.
Worship services at Crossgates may feature a full orchestra, choir, a band, or any combination thereof. Having such diverse worship services and accommodating such a large congregation of parishioners can present many challenges from a wireless infrastructure and audio quality perspective.
Late last year, Brian Hilburn, FOH engineer for Crossgates, was faced with an aging infrastructure of inferior wireless microphones, receivers and other equipment. They had been in the facility for over a decade, and elements of the system were beginning to fail on a routine and unpredictable basis.
In addition, the 700 MHz band was also about to take effect. Hilburn knew he had to make an investment in wireless infrastructure that would last for many years to come—and that could deliver the exceptional sound quality he expected.
Wireless microphones are an integral, critical part of Crossgates’ worship services: “Every Sunday morning, we are running about 30 channels of wireless, including16 channels of in ear monitors (IEMs) and of course all the wireless mics to accompany that,” Hilburn says.
“In addition, we require wireless microphones on all our instruments—including guitars, percussion, piano and everything else.”
Crossgates ended up acquiring 16 channels of Sennheiser’s ew 300 IEM G3 series in ear monitors, in addition to 10 SKM 2000 handheld transmitters and two SKM 5200 transmitters, both of which were outfitted with Neumann 105 capsules.
As part of the equipment acquisition and installation, Sennheiser also included its RF services and wireless frequency coordination.
“We liked the idea of having either a cardioid or super cardioid capsule on the mic, because a lot of our singers are singing very near other sources. We also wanted to have the ability to run higher SPLs in our services and having a capsule that would reject,” Hilburn says.
“The most important thing for us however was having a microphone that is transparent and accurately reproduces the human voice as it really sounds, since our primary application was for vocals.”
Hilburn appreciates the command feature on the SKM 5200 handheld transmitter, which enables his entire production team to make changes on the fly to their worship agenda with the press of a button.
The command feature facilitates routing of the signal to an auxiliary output, so the production team can communicate discreetly and remain in control. “Communication is a key for what we do on stage and we consider the work of the Holy Spirit very important in our services,” he says.
“If we feel that He is leading us in a different direction, we want to be able to guide the service accordingly—this might mean cuing the musicians to skip a verse in a song, or changing a song selection entirely. Before, our worship pastors had to be rigged up with two discrete systems—one ‘live’ and one for the internal production team.”
By using Sennheiser’s Wireless Systems Manager (WSM), Hilburn is able to monitor system parameters in real time via the network. “With the WMS software, we are able to gain complete transparency into our system to make sure everything is working as it should,” Hilburn says.
“For example, I can now see if one of our singers is overdriving their in ear monitors, and if so, control it for them on the fly. Having this kind of control is outstanding.”
“The system is performing flawlessly and it has been an awesome experience. I credit Sennheiser’s Kent Margraves in helping us understand the 700 MHz issue—he knew the technical requirements and told us about all the risks so we were prepared.” he says.
Hilburn has received many accolades on the audio quality, too: “Right away, our singers noticed a huge difference in the sound quality they were getting through their monitors. I remember the first morning we put the system into use, everyone was raving about what they heard!”
