CITY CHURCH SPREADS THE WORD WITH ILIVE

With a congregation of approximately 7,000 worshippers spread over six locations, City Church in Seattle recently made the decision to connect its main Kirkland campus with its other locations via live satellite broadcasts.

Designer, Justin Friesen, created a networked audio solution based around Allen & Heath’s iLive digital mixing system, obtained through Lift AV in Renton, WA, and GC Pro in Seattle. When completed, the main sanctuary along with four other meeting rooms will all be connected to the broadcast master control room, which will uplink audio and video to the satellite. The five remote campuses are each outfitted with a satellite dish to receive the live broadcasts in their own sanctuaries.

“It’s a pretty ambitious project,” affirms City Church audio engineer, Billy Massey. “We just finished phase one, which was installing the digital infrastructure for both the live sound in the main sanctuary and a separate broadcast feed.”

“This project calls for a total of five systems. Every room is different, and they all have to talk to the broadcast centre,” notes Friesen. “The variety of different yet compatible models makes the iLive digital range the perfect choice.”

The main house system comprises an iDR10 MixRack with iLive-144 Control Surface, fully loaded with six input modules, two output modules and a 2-slot Aviom digital output module. This console handles the live audio for the 2300-seat sanctuary, both FOH and monitors.

“We run a pretty high-energy contemporary programme,” says Massey. “iLive gives us an incredible sound and makes mixing really easy. I set up separate DCA groups by instrument type and dial in all my FX. What I really like is being able to assign the FX I want to each channel and use the faders to bring them in and out on the fly. I love it!”

The broadcast room is built around a compact iLive-80 system. All individual inputs from the sanctuary are split off and sent to the broadcast mix room via EtherSound audio networking on CAT5 cabling. The iLive-80 uses an iDR0 mini MixRack, providing robust DSP power without unnecessary inputs and outputs. The engineer makes a custom broadcast mix using the raw inputs slaved from the main iLive system with the DSP from the iDR0. This eliminates the sonic compromise involved in attempting to make a single mix work effectively for both purposes. The stereo broadcast mix is then sent to the master control room where it is ingested by the satellite encoder for transmission.

Each campus has its own worship team, with Pastor Judah Smith’s sermon from the main Kirkland facility being broadcast live to all. Sunday service times are all synchronised, with each campus using a floor manager with an intercom system to coordinate timing with the director in Kirkland.

The next installation phase will enable broadcast programming for the Kirkland campus’s three youth and children ministries. The Generation Church youth facility will be outfitted with an iLive-112 system, which will handle audio for the 500-capacity auditorium’s FOH and Aviom monitor systems. The smaller City Kids and G2 rooms will both use fixed I/O compact iLive-T systems.

“Basically, we’re just copying the set up from the sanctuary and adding more legs to feed the broadcast centre,” explains designer Justin Friesen. “All the rooms will feed an EtherSound switch in master control, which then feeds the satellite encoder. iLive makes it easy to scale the system that way.”

“iLive is the key to it all,” asserts Massey. “The design is so intuitive! It has all the features of a digital system but with the feel of an analogue console. That’s critical because we have a lot of volunteers, and this lets us train them quickly and efficiently. Our transition to digital was painless. We got our initial training and were up and running within a day.”