The dynamic Life Church ministry regularly reaches capacity with nearly 800 people attending every Sunday. Growing congregation sizes, and an increasing focus on music and performance in its services, led the Church into consultation with Midas ProSound, the Salisbury-based installation specialists, who helped them draw up an extensive upgrade schedule for all audio and video facilities.
Midas ProSound was able to provide the team from Life Church with system designs and in-situ demonstrations of all the main components save for one: the M-48 personal monitor mixers from RSS which, together with the M-400 V-Mixer, S-1608 Digital Snakes and PowerV active loudspeakers from Tannoy, form the core of the new sound reinforcement system. The first M-48 units arrived in the UK just hours before installation work started at Life Church.
"Although we were able to demonstrate the RSS M-400 in a live situation, the Church had to take our word for it that the M-48s were the perfect solution and a logical alternative for their conventional wedges," explains Paul Nicholson of Midas ProSound. "RSS have a fantastic product on their hands, and I believe the benefits of it will be immediately obvious to all houses of worship."
Midas ProSound engineers installed Cat5e cable runs from the M-400 at FOH to stage, linking a pair of S-1608 stage boxes and the M-48 control hub; this was enhanced by redundancy lines and Sonar splits to allow recording and broadcast.
"Everything worked right out of the boxes and the band were able to walk straight in and begin rehearsing," says Nicholson. "The M-400 V2 software enables full control of the M-48's patching but also delivers L, C, R panning, 8-band parametric or switchable 31-band EQ, an onboard analyser which can monitor any input or output, and all the classic Roland analogue effects including the Space Echo. Wayne Wolstenholme, the Life Church sound engineer, was able to use all the advanced software features to set up the FOH and M-48 mixes really quickly and then store them down as master files and scenes to the M-400 and M-48 memories. Try doing that with an analogue desk! So a resounding success for the RSS system, and we will be supplying an additional six M-48s on the next phase of the project."
A distributed Tannoy system, with cabinets finished in white, consists of 2 rows of 4 x PowerV12 loudspeakers mounted at ceiling height across the front half of the worship space, providing full-range coverage for the congregation. A single ceiling-mounted PowerV12 over the FOH mix position (outside the main PA coverage) provides monitoring, enabling the engineer to listen to the FOH mix, aux sends, M-48 mixes, and channel solo. In addition, a pair of PowerV8s were installed as flown stage monitors. System delays and EQ are handled by a pair of Tannoy SC-1 controllers with each speaker having its own delay and EQ settings.
Wayne Wolstenholme comments: "The RSS M-400 and M-48 have provided us with an almost silent stage (apart from drums) and also relieved me from the pressure of having to mix the monitors. I can now do what a FOH engineer should be doing. As for the Tannoy system, the PowerV12s have amazing clarity, coverage and are very musical. The PowerV8 is amazing, we have one as an infill and two for foldback on stage. Looking at it, you'd think it won't do a good enough job . . . hold your thoughts though and just listen to them."
(Lee Baldock)
