Description

River Hills Baptist Church is a growing, vibrant 1500 member congregation in Corpus Christie, Texas. The church expanded into new facilities in February 2011, and the decision was made to invest in state-of-the-art audio and video presentation and recording tools for this new home.

“A no-hassle, plug and play solution - believe it. It was one of the easiest installations that I’ve performed on an audio project”

Challenge

William Brown, Minister of Music, envisioned a system that could be flexibly extended to serve several overlapping purposes. He wanted to record services and events, and also wished to utilize the power of the popular Pro Presenter software to display worship media at stations around the facility. This included monitor information for performers at services as well as kiosks for congregation members.

William recognized that a networked solution would be ideal, but knew that legacy audio over Ethernet solutions would not be compatible with the rest of the system without extensive investment in hardware and redundant connections.

Solution

William started with a Yamaha M7CL digital mixing console and was told about the Dante MY16-AUD cards for Yamaha products. Recognizing that a Dante solution would allow him to use a single unified network, William purchased three Dante MY16-AUD cards for the M7CL.

Dante Virtual Soundcard was installed on several Mac PCs, allowing each computer to act as an active Dante audio node capable of sending and receiving up to 64 channels of audio. ProTools9™ was installed on one machine in order to record events and sermons, while the others ran Pro Presenter at different locations around the facility.

This arrangement allows the congregation of River Hills Baptist to see and hear the services from different stations within the church in real time, with audio streamed from the M7CL directly to each PC. Announcements are  made through this system as well.

The ability to record anything from the M7CL to ProTools enables William to quickly create and upload sermons for church podcasts, meaning that no member of the congregation has to miss what is being said even when they are away from home.

Dante-enabled equipment used:

Dante MY16-AUD

Dante Virtual Soundcard

Yamaha M7CL

Benefits and Savings:

• Ability to use existing church IT infrastructure to distribute audio
• Share audio data for simultaneous use in recording and live playout around the facility
• Lower cost that non-IP compliant solutions, no need for redundant wiring and additional hardware