The sprawling campus of Tulsa’s Redeemer Church, just a short drive from the banks of the Arkansas River, has long been a gathering spot for this south Tulsa neighborhood. From pre-school and teen activities to homeless ministry and outreach, Redeemer’s Evangelical congregation and staff have contributed to the local community.
Redeemer moved to their current site several years ago, and have been involved in an ongoing process of renovating it to serve the needs of their congregation. Recently the church undertook a major project in their Redeemer Hall, involving room combining for the halls and four classrooms, as well as an additional children’s wing. Audio, video, and control systems were reworked, including bringing in audio and video feeds from the church’s 800-seat auditorium.
“The auditorium was originally built for a Christian artist who was the worship pastor of the church at the time, and the sound system actually sounds great,” explains Brent Handy of Advanced Sound and Communications in Kansas City, MO. “They’ve been making some changes to the space as time and budget allowed, to make it more their own. This project was originally targeted for some time in the future, but the Covid19 shutdown enabled them to get in there and do all the work at once, so they took advantage of the opportunity.”
The main Redeemer Hall can be divided into three smaller halls. The children’s wing also has two large spaces, with air walls for combining them. As Handy observes, expanding the existing Q-Sys based AV network was easily accomplished. “They already had a Core 510 in place for the main system. We installed a Core 110F to run the rest of the building. There is enough processing power to accommodate full redundancy.”
Multiple Visionary Solutions PocketAV Duet encoder/decoder pairs bring video content to multiple screens within the hall, classrooms, and check-in areas. Each room is equipped with Visionary Solutions PacketAV wallplate encoders, providing Dante/AES67 connectivity for UHD video, control, and POE, enabling congregants and presenters to easily connect computers, phones, and other devices and route to anywhere in the facility. Additional encoders live in an equipment rack, receiving signal from a local computer and the auditorium.
“The Visionary Solutions team were great to work with,” Handy recounts. “We didn’t really need a ton of support, because the system was easy to implement. But they were always available and really responsive any time we had any questions.”
All in all, the job went smoothly and the result is a vastly improved and dramatically simplified AV system. “Their previous system was overly complex, and required literally racks of equipment,” Handy concludes. “By expanding the Q-Sys based network and implementing Visionary Solutions technology for their AV distribution, we were able to reduce the amount of rack space by a third, and create a system that was not only more streamlined, but far more user friendly, even for the most non-technical members of the congregation.”
