Good Shepherd Church in Bokjeong-dong, South Korea, has recently scaled up the mixing system in its Glory Hall, adding an Allen & Heath Avantis console along with a set of ME-1 personal mixers for the praise team.
The 600-seat Glory Hall is church’s secondary chapel and is mainly used for morning worship. Sunday services are also being held in the hall at present, with capacity reduced to allow worshippers to come together within the country’s social distancing rules.
The previous digital console installed in the Glory Hall had begun to show its age and was struggling to accommodate growing channel counts. Working closely with Allen & Heath distributor, Sama Sound, Good Shepherd Church made the upgrade to a 64-channel, 42-bus Avantis mixer, as well as the dPack processing upgrade and a GX4816 AudioRack for onstage I/O.
Another major change to the Glory Hall is the replacement of the praise band’s monitor wedges with an ME personal mixing system. Connected to the Avantis via a ME-U hub, six ME-1 units allow the musicians to tailor their own headphone mixes. “Thanks to the ME-1 personal mixers, the sound on stage is well managed, making mixing easier, and the performers are comfortable because the sound quality is very high and they are easy to operate,” explains Kim Hyun-seok, leader of Good Shepherd Church’s audio team.
The decision to invest in Avantis was influenced by the church’s positive experiences with Allen & Heath’s SQ series mixers, which were already installed in two of its spaces. An SQ-7 console manages audio in the 300-seat Vision Hall, a multi-purpose facility used for youth worship and Sunday schools.
“The SQ interface is very intuitive and the sound quality is excellent,” concludes Kim Hyun-seok. “To be more specific about the audio quality, I would say that the resolution and sense of space are excellent. This is especially evident in the recording output.” An SQ-6 mixer has also been installed in the praise team’s rehearsal space in the church’s basement.
