Church Unlimited’s broadcast site in Corpus Christi, TX seats over 1,500 worshipers. Photo courtesy DiGiCo / KLANGFRONT of HOUSE Magazine has a pretty restricted emphasis — live sound — and we do it really well. And live sound is the central focus of us house of worship practitioners, but as we all know, anything that is even a tiny bit adjacent to sound will be handed off to “the sound people” at church. And that’s okay — we know what we’re doing, and we’ll make sound happen no matter which segment of audio into which it falls. Producing high quality audio for our livestream is important — even more important, some say, than the audio we present in person at church. It’s not a competition, and we’ll do well to consider it all important. If indeed we are called upon to present high-quality audio with our livestream or broadcast, there are a few things we’ll want to think about.
Raising the Bar
A substantial number of churches do a livestream. It was already a strong trend before Covid-19, and obviously became even more common during the quarantine. I would guess that the vast majority of churches who started streaming during the quarantine continued to do so afterward. Some started out with very rudimentary technology and techniques but have since raised the bar to present a much better product. And presenting a high-quality stream truly is important for two key reasons: first, your livestream is the main portal through which the outside world sees your church, and second, the internet is permanent — once it’s out there, it’s out there. There are many reasons to put our best foot forward with our livestream, but these two are among the most crucial.
You may not have the budget to create a discrete mix, separate from the output of your FOH console, but if so, please plan on making that disadvantage temporary. It’s possible to get a decent livestream mix from your FOH mixer, but the only way you’ll achieve true excellence here is to create a completely separate mix for the online congregation. Optimally, you’ll want to have the capacity to mix every individual signal from the platform, but if budget doesn’t permit, at least get subgroups under the control of a human being. This is better than sending out your FOH mixer’s headphone output over the interwebs, but not by much. In the age of attractively priced digital mixers, it’s cheaper and easier than ever to have every instrument on stage represented by a fader. If dedicating a mixer for your livestream is not in the cards, there is an alternative that can be substantially less expensive, and possibly even higher quality than a traditional mixer: you could mix the livestream with a computer DAW. If you absolutely insist on faders, there are some great controllers available for reasonable prices. There are actually a number of advantages that result from going the DAW direction: for one, the number of channels is only limited by the channel count of your digital audio network and the horsepower of your computer’s CPU. Also, budget hardware mixers can be somewhat limited in the processing available on each channel. Most DAWs facilitate the use of numerous plugins per channel, and you also have the option of instantiating that one really good compressor (or EQ or reverb) plugin you love so much. And there are indeed a whole bunch of truly excellent plugins available online — literally for free. And if you’re concerned about the latency created by using lots of plugins, remember that the streaming software and the online platform itself will be adding multiple seconds of latency — the milliseconds your pitch correction plugins add become kind of laughable. There was a time when it could be argued that hardware mixers were more solid and reliable than a computer, but at this point, a lot of hardware mixers are essentially computers with built-in control surfaces. A computer dedicated to the singular task of mixing the livestream can exhibit excellent reliability.
Isolating the Mix
Whether you use a traditional hardware mixer or a DAW to mix your stream, it is important to acoustically isolate this mix from the main sanctuary. The person mixing will need to hear what’s going out into the world, and only that. Our in-person parishioners hear a blend of our PA system and whatever acoustical elements are loud enough to be heard (and not just musical instruments or vocals — more on that in a moment). The online congregation will only hear that which we deliberately present to them, and it’s difficult at best for a mix engineer to get it right if they’re hearing the PA. Put them in a different room — a room as far as possible from the long bass waves produced by the main sanctuary PA — maybe even a different building, if that can be accomplished. And treat that space like a music mixing suite, replete with proper acoustical treatment, a nice pair of monitors, and also a NOT so nice pair of monitors — much of the audience will be streaming with a mobile phone, tablet, or laptop, and quite a few of them will be hearing your audio through earbuds or headphones. Your mix engineer should occasionally check the mix with those monitoring modalities as a quality check. It’s also helpful if the mix engineer can see the visual part of the stream in real time — they’ll be helpfully influenced to mix to the visual.
A Touch of Ambience
Another important consideration: you’ll need to blend in some room mics. If you don’t, it sounds weird and unnatural. It’s good for the online congregation to hear the in-person congregation, along with some room ambience, but take care to avoid over-doing it. You will almost certainly be presenting pre-produced video in the stream — take good care of that audio as well. You will definitely want multi-stage dynamics processing on the output bus — at least a glue-type compressor and definitely a broadcast-style brickwall limiter. Think a bit like a mastering engineer, and remember that there is main output LUFS level above which your streaming service will start to turn things down. Get it solid, but don’t run afoul of the normalization police! Mono is okay, but people have come to expect stereo these days. Immersive is fine, but ensure that it’s folding down properly for your congregants who don’t have 7.1.4 (or even 5.1) in their living rooms. Your livestream is how the outside world sees your church — it’s worth taking steps to make sure you get its audio component exactly right.
John McJunkin is an adjunct professor at Grand Canyon University.
