The Chapel in Green recently completed the final phase of a major audio system upgrade by installing an Allen & Heath dLive S Class Digital Mixing System and an ME Series Personal Mixing System. Built in 2003, the church is one of four campuses of ‘The Chapel’, a non-denominational church in the Akron, Ohio region and features an 1800 seat sanctuary and 80ft by 40ft stage.
The Chapel in Green’s worship services can feature its 60 member choir, full orchestra and a praise band with their respective vocalists. Christmas and Easter programs can utilise as many as 80 microphones and other sources. Provided by integrator Pro Audio Innovations, the dLive S Class mixes and controls these sources with an S7000 Surface, a DM64 MixRack, three DX32 Expanders and an IP8 Remote Controller, used in the video booth.
Technical Director, Rick Zuercher uses dLive layers to organise the church’s many inputs. The praise band and vocalists fill the top layer while orchestra, choir microphones and other sources are quickly accessible from the dLive’s lower layers and critical sources like the pastor’s mic and the worship leader’s mic are ‘frozen’ on all layers. Rick uses dLive delay and chorus effects and the dual-stage valve (tube emulation) on selected sources and records services to a stereo video recorder. The entire dLive setup is saved to a USB drive and each volunteer operator has their own login allowing them to access their own settings quickly.
The church’s ME system consists of an ME-U Hub and twelve ME-1 Personal Mixers which are used by band members to mix their own in-ear monitors. Rick noted, “The sonic quality of the ME’s is a huge step up from the personal mixers we were using. And the musicians love the local mic feature which allows them to hear what’s going on in the room.”
The dLive S Class enabled The Chapel in Green to eliminate a pair of older digital mixers, a master clock and a troublesome digital snake. “The dLive is very user-friendly for John Maloney, Jon Pinney and Steve Henry our technical volunteers,” said Rick. “Also, we were astonished at the clarity when we eliminated the old snake and went direct to the DM64 and up to the S7000. The dLive’s sound quality was the biggest unexpected gift that we received. And we are easily up 6dB in gain before feedback compared to the old system.”
