The recent Worship Facilities Conference and Expo (WFX) in Charlotte provided an excellent format for church sound and technical personnel to take advantage of well-conceived, targeted educational sessions as well as to have a look at some of the latest in audio gear and technology.
The expansive trade show floor played host to a range of leading manufacturers who utilized the show to introduce and demonstrate recent developments to an audience growing both in terms of size and technical savvy.
The Roland Systems Group (RSS) unveiled the latest addition to its successful V-Mixing System range, with the new M-380 representing the company’s most compact effort to date.
Measuring just 19 inches wide by less than 23 inches high, it still packs a complete 48-channel mixing console with 18 buses, 8 matrices, channel and bus DSP, 4 stereo FX processors, 4 graphic EQs, built-in stereo recording and playback, and built in multi-channel split port.
The layout of the M-380 is designed to be fast and intuitive for the beginner but with plenty of functionality and features expected by experienced professionals.
Like other V-Mixing models, it also incorporates a digital snake making for simple, seamless Cat5e distribution as well as being configurable with remotely controlled mic preamps.
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The M-380 is also available in a rack-mount format, which combined with its simple onboard connectivity, makes it a very attractive package for the worship audio market, portable church applications in particular.
XTA highlighted its new DC1048 audio processor featuring full matrix mixing and a palette of EQ functions that can be remotely controlled with the company’s new iCore software package.
Also on display were the NXBoB8 and NXBoB16 breakout boxes, which also can be addressed with iCore, with the crowning element is that these components are all enabled to work with Audinate Dante networking.
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The breakout boxes easily connect to other Dante-enabled devices such as processors or mixing consoles over either 100Mb or 1 Gigabit Ethernet.
This complement of technology has already been utilized successfully on higher end touring applications such as a recent tour by Oasis, but it’s such an elegant, user-friendly package that it will likely gain very strong traction in the worship audio market.