JAMESTOWN, NY – Can a snake ever be considered trustworthy? As long as it's Aviom's Pro16 Digital Snake, Randall Turner, owner of Turner Specialty Contractors, would say "yes." Turner is now using the digital snake along with Aviom's A-16II Personal Mixers for Family Church of the Southern Tier, which recently moved to a new facility here.
"Most of the time you don't even know it's there, because it runs so well," Turner said. The fact that the Aviom modules are connected using Cat-5, which serves as the backbone for the church's entire AV system, is an added bonus.
The church's Aviom system includes two Aviom AN-16/o Output Modules located in a rack at the front of house along with two AN-16/i Input Modules and an AN-16SBR System Bridge.
One of the AN-16/i Input Modules sends 16 channels from the front of house console to amps via an AN-16/o Output Module located in the rack room on the side of the stage.
Mic inputs on stage are connected to two AN-16/i-M Mic Input Modules housed in the rack room. These signals are converted back to analog by the front of house AN-16/o Output Modules, which feed a 40-channel Crest analog mixing console.
The entire 32×16 digital snake is connected between stage and front of house through AN-16SBR System Bridges, which are located at each end. These units make it possible to combine all 48 channels on the one Cat-5 cable that connects the two locations.
The second AN-16/i Input Module at front of house feeds the personal mixing system. It is connected to an A-16D Pro Distributor in the rack room. This A-16D Pro distributes 16 channels and DC power to the seven A-16II Personal Mixers used by the church's musicians on stage.
The worship musicians rely on the personal mixers to create custom monitor mixes tailored to their individual needs, including control over channel volume, grouping, pan, stereo spread, master volume and tone.
According to Turner, the performers have had good things to say about the personal mixers, which provide the settings to save and recall as many as 16 custom preset mixes each.
The appreciation that Turner and his team have for the Aviom system grew even stronger after a mishap involving an auto-isolation transformer – which is used to isolate grounds and eliminate the hum found in other systems.
When the transformer was turned on for the first time, nearly 180 volts of power surged through the circuits of the audio, video and lighting equipment, all of which had already been switched on by staff members.
Since a typical voltage for this amount of gear usually runs at about 115-125 Volts, most of the AV system was burned out. The Aviom gear, however, was able to withstand the abuse.
"I had a surge protector connected to all the gear, which was a nice buffer, and the unit smoked," said Turner. "I started panicking, thinking I had thousands of dollars worth of gear that was probably all burned up in a moment's notice. So we started testing all the equipment and the Aviom still worked. We fried a lot of gear that day, but not our Aviom network."
Five-year-old Family Church of the Southern Tier has grown from just a handful of followers to two full Sunday services with an average of 270 parishioners. The new sanctuary's grand opening hosted nearly 500 people. The church has plans to convert its previous building into a children's worship center.
For more information, please visit www.aviom.com.
