To keep up with this growth, I was asked by our church pastor to look into upgrading the church’s existing audio system to a state-of-the-art system for our 3,500-seat church.

We wanted a system that could handle the church service audio and provide a lot of horsepower. This project was initiated two years ago and it all began with a call that I made to Yamaha Commercial Audio Systems.

Yamaha and their local dealer made several visits to our facility, with one of these being a design meeting with Joe Rimstidt, a systems engineer from Nexo (a subsidiary of Yamaha Corporation Japan). He developed the final audio design for our sound system.

The project, which was approved in mid 2011, included a number of Nexo and Yamaha loudspeakers and power amplifiers, all driven by two Yamaha digital audio consoles. A Yamaha LS9-32 console with Aviom card was installed in the monitor position in the church and a Yamaha M7CL-48 provides us with front-of-house mixes. All system routing and dynamics are handled by the Yamaha M7CL-48 and stored.

MIXES ANYWHERE IN THE HOUSE
A big advantage with this setup is that now the church band has complete control over its mixes. Also, both Yamaha consoles are connected to my iPad, so I can do mixes from any seat in the house.

The church produces a weekly live stream television broadcast for those unable to attend the sermons, and the Yamaha M7CL was my first choice for mixing in the video broadcast suite created for this purpose.

As part of our AV installation, we also needed an audio console that would allow us to mix on the fly and would work well with Pro Tools in postproduction work. The Yamaha M7CL was a really good fit for us, and since it was installed our live stream broadcast audio mixes have been very consistent.

The church allows non-audio professional church members to work alongside a professional audio engineer to help with the mixing and monitoring of the audio. Consequently, it was very important to have equipment that is user friendly and comes without a steep learning curve. Yamaha has really done a great job in making sure that people can effectively use their consoles.

TheYamaha LS9 also has some other features that make it easy for a non-professional to operate, including gates, compressors, equalizers on every channel, along with scene recalls and storage. These features simplify operations greatly. The routing is amazing and very easy to understand.

Joseph Spencer III is technical director and front-of-House engineer for First Baptist Church Lincoln Gardens. He may be contacted at jspenceriii@mac.com.

For additional information, contact Yamaha Commercial Audio Systems at 714-522-9011 or visit www.yamahaca.com.