Founded in 1915, Emanuel Lutheran Church built its current campus on Santa Barbara’s Modoc Road in 1969. Emanuel Lutheran’s audio system supports its blend of traditional liturgical elements with hymns and contemporary music. In a desire to improve audio quality and provide additional flexibility for its services, the church decided to upgrade its system in late 2015.
Emanuel Lutheran asked Brian Thompson of TNR Electronics in Ojai, and Ed Simeone of Dedicated Marketing in Westlake Village, to provide the upgrade. They wanted improved voice intelligibility and music quality. They wanted flexible configurations for their various services. And, they wanted a hands-off user interface for most services with the option of operator control when needed.
Simeone chose Allen & Heath’s Qu-Pac digital audio mixer to fill these needs. It offered the hands-off, automatic-mixer operation the church wanted and an iPad interface for operator control when needed. The rack-mount Qu-Pac could be hidden in the church’s equipment closet and had ample DSP for everything from house equalisation to reverb for the choir mics.
As part of the upgrade, Simeone added a pair of Tannoy VLS column loudspeakers and connected them to the Qu-Pac’s main outputs. A Qu-Pac matrix output feeds the church’s existing Bose loudspeakers and another feeds their Listen Technologies’ assistive listening system. Lab Gruppen amplifiers power the loudspeakers and the church has eight wireless microphones, six wired microphones, a Tascam CD recorder and a CD duplication system.
Ed likes the Qu-Pac’s three access levels which allow the church to make basic changes while preserving the core setups and he saved the entire Qu-Pac configuration on a memory stick. He commented: “The church achieved all of their goals from this upgrade and the Qu-Pac is now the heart of their system. It gave the church one-button operation for most services and iPad control from anywhere in the sanctuary when they need it. I trusted the Qu-Pac’s sound quality based on my experience with Allen & Heath’s classic analogue mixers, so the upgrade is really a whole new system.
