KIRKLAND, WA — With a congregation of about 7,000 worshippers spread over six locations, City Church opted to connect its main Kirkland campus with its other locations via satellite, enabling live broadcasts. Designer Justin Friesen created a networked audio solution based around Allen & Heath iLive digital mixing consoles supplied by 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,” said 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.” With the next phase aimed at providing similar output from the children’s, student and adult ministries at the Kirkland campus, the key to success was effortless signal flow.
“This project calls for a total of five consoles. Every room is different, and they all have to talk to the broadcast center,” notes designer Justin Friesen. “The variety of different yet compatible models made Allen & Heath digital the perfect choice.”
The main house console is an iLive-144 with iDR-10 MixRack, fully loaded with six input modules, two output modules and a two-slot Aviom digital output module. This console handles the live audio for the 2300-seat sanctuary, both house and monitors.
“We run a pretty high-energy contemporary program,” said Massey, “and the iLive gives us an incredible sound and makes mixing really easy. I do separate DCA groups by instrument type, and dial in all my effects. What I really like is being able to assign the effects 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 desk. 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 the economical iDR-0 MixRack, providing robust DSP power without unneeded inputs and outputs. The engineer does a custom broadcast mix, using the raw inputs slaved from the main iLive-144 with the DSP from the iDR-0. 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 synchronized, with each campus using a floor manager with an intercom system to coordinate timing with the director in Kirkland.
In the program’s next phase, City Church’s three youth and children programs will also originate their own broadcast programming. “Basically, we’re just copying the setup from the sanctuary and adding more legs to feed the broadcast center,” said designer Justin Friesen. “All the rooms will feed an EtherSound switch in master control, which then feeds the satellite encoder. The iLive makes it easy to scale the system that way.” The Generation Church youth facility will be outfitted with an iLive-112, which will handle audio for the 500-capacity auditorium’s house and Aviom monitor systems. The smaller City Kids and G2 rooms will both use iLive-T Series consoles.
“The Allen & Heath iLive is the key to it all,” said Billy Massey. “The design is so intuitive! It has all the features of a digital system but with the feel of an analog 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. Eventually all our remote campuses will be standardized on iLive as well.”
For more information, check out the iLive system at www.ilive-digital.com.
