COLORADO SPRINGS, CO — Mountain Springs Church (MSC) recently upgraded the sound systems at two of its church locations here with three DiGiCo SD consoles. Tech director Keith Miller spearheaded the audio overhaul that led to the purchase of the SD9 and two SD11 consoles, working with Sight and Sound Technologies.
More details from DiGiCo (www.digico.org):
Mountain Springs Church (MSC) in situated in the heart of Colorado Springs, Colorado, and has served the community since 1995. The congregation has grown considerably since its inception and in the fall of 2011, newly appointed Tech Director Keith Miller spearheaded a project to overhaul MSC’s audio production gear at the main Woodmen campus as well as to outfit their second, smaller University Center campus. Miller was instrumental in the purchase of three DiGiCo SD consoles—an SD9 and two SD11s—facilitated by Sight and Sound Technologies. The SD9 was placed at FOH with the SD11 connected via DiGiCo Little Blue and Little Red Boxes, going into the video room at the Woodmen campus to handle separate audio mixes for live and Internet streams of their weekend services, (which solved the challenge of how to mix both feeds simultaneously off the same console). The second SD11 went to the satellite location—which is set up and torn down every week. The decision to place DiGiCo consoles uniformly across live and broadcast stations in both locations made it easier to streamline its training process.
“At the same time we were overhauling our first campus at Woodmen, we had just launched the second University Center location,” Miller explains. “I chose to go with DiGiCo’s SD systems because I had used them in the past and loved how they sounded. Plus, it’s extremely easy to cross-train people across any DiGiCo SD series. Now that we have expanded to multiple sites with more locations likely in the future, having one platform to work from is just what we were looking for to streamline the technical equipment and training process for our volunteer-based tech team.”
Miller found a lot to love, feature- and functionality-wise, in both consoles. “The SD9 and SD11 offered so much more, really, than any other console in its price range. The Flexi Buss feature really opened up a lot of options for us. You can mix in any type of situation without being stuck with a limited amount of auxes or groups. Also, having macros that can do more than one function is really nice, and the ability to have an alternative input on mono channels really cuts down on patching between our weekend and youth services. By utilizing the Little Blue and Little Red Boxes, it allows us to see all 64 stage inputs from the SD9 and SD11 at the same time, which is awesome. And the sound from the SD9 is just so warm and clear. The first service we did with it, I couldn’t believe how much cleaner and fuller the sound was.”
“The SD9 has a very precise sound,” adds audio volunteer Ryan Durban. “It makes a complicated, multiboard setup very simple, and cleans up a mess of cables that were previously problematic.”
