Hillsong Church had been planning to build a larger auditorium since moving into its current building four years ago. With only two worship centres - one holding 1,500 at Baulkham Hills in Sydney's north west, and the other holding about 1,200 in Waterloo near the heart of the city - they had already exceeded capacity before they moved in. With between 10 and 12 services held across the two worship centres on a weekend alone, the need for a bigger auditorium was overdue.
The audio tender for the new building took around 18 months to write and involved a team of five engineers. Production manager Dave Watson was pleased to keep the faith with Soundcraft mixing consoles, having used Delta and Venue series boards (for FOH and monitors) over a seven-year period. "We have always found the preamps to be good quality and the EQs to be responsive," he says. "The brightness and sparkle of the preamps work especially well when it comes to using in-ear monitors."
Soundcraft was again the preferred option for both FOH and monitors in the youth hall of the new building (seating 800) - a new MH4 deployed at FOH and an SM20 on monitor duty. Dave Watson says: "In order to give these boards a trial prior to installation we decided to upgrade the two consoles in the current auditorium. This would give us a chance to train our engineers while also making sure the consoles would be suitable for the new building." Thus 40-channel SM20 and MH4 desks were installed and are currently in use. The SM20 is being used to maximum capacity, with eight sends of wedges and the remainder IEM (providing four stereo and the rest mono mixes). Watson continues: "When we installed the MH4 we discovered our PA to be a lot more responsive below 150 Hz than ever before - the preamps are very impressive."
He states that the FOH desk is configured for dual-mode operation. "Normally it is a stand-alone FOH board only, with the SM20 handling all monitors. But during the week it sometimes used to control four sends of monitors as well. We call this 'solo pilot mode', and it enables us to cut out a monitor engineer when they are not needed."
Supplier of all the audio equipment for the new building was local company, Lots Of Watts. In addition to the local suppliers, Dave Watson also praises Soundcraft distributor Jands for their support. He says: "Jands technical support has been fantastic and they have helped us way beyond expectation."
(Lee Baldock)
