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New Birth South Metropolitan Church resounds with INNOVASON
New Birth South Metropolitan Church, a brand new build 4,000-seat worship facility in the south metropolitan area of Atlanta, GA, is the latest growing congregation to benefit from a state-of-the-art digital audio network built around three INNOVASON digital mixing consoles. Established in 2001, New Birth South now numbers over 12,000 members and has recently moved to its new home on 43 acres of land in McDonough, GA. The new premises boasts a technologically sophisticated AV system including three INNOVASON digital consoles on an EtherSound network connected to a PC equipped with an LX4646ES soundcard from Digigram for high quality digital multitrack recording.
According to NBSMC's technical director, David Patrick, the idea from the beginning was to go digital. "For a large multifunction installation like ours, the practical and economic advantages offered by a digital system are too numerous to ignore," he noted. "The question remained, which one to go for?" Patrick and his technical team researched a number of options from various manufacturers before Dave Gill of Atlanta Sound Works in Fayetteville, GA, set up a meeting with Steve Simmons, the technical director of Perimeter Church, (also in metropolitan Atlanta) and long-time INNOVASON user. "Steve represented the product very well," observed Patrick. "He was extremely knowledgeable about it, and also had a lot of experience with other digital products in the market. His experience with INNOVASON in his church was a definite turning point for me."
As a result, Patrick opted for two 104 input/48 bus Sy80 consoles for FoH and monitor duties and a 72 input/40 bus Sy48 for recording/broadcast purposes. The Sy48 is linked to a PC equipped with a Digigram LX6464ES sound card for high quality digital multitrack recording over EtherSound. The FoH console benefits from INNOVASON's new universal output modules as well as the new internal effects card, while the monitor console is also equipped with a DioAV Aviom interface card for direct connectivity to two discrete 16-channel A-Net networks. Both Sy80 consoles come with a local Mix Rack, and a separate DioCore (INNOVASON's dedicated EtherSound-enabled stagebox) takes the 58 stage inputs and transmits them directly across the network to all consoles.
"I was impressed by a number of things from INNOVASON," continued Patrick. "Having talked to several engineers in the Metro Atlanta area, it was clear that reliability is a big issue with digital consoles, and it's something I was particularly worried about with going all-digital. I was reassured when Steve Simmons mentioned that he'd never experienced so much as a hiccup in three years of running his INNOVASONs, and our experience so far has borne this out. What's more, the sound quality is very clean, and the advantage of a digital platform is that it is easily upgradeable."
Patrick also found that there were also many plus points from a functionality point of view. "The "any fader can be anything" concept is a great feature that I've not seen with any other manufacturer," he enthused. "It allows you to lay out your work surface any way you want, and avoids unnecessary flipping of pages, which is a real boon. It also means that you can configure your console to perform different functions (FoH, monitors, recording) whenever you like, and very easily. This flexibility is especially useful for us as our input list changes frequently as we welcome different acts and artists to our facility. We simply set up the consoles to suit their needs, and off we go."
"I'm also delighted by the recording capacity of the LX6464ES in conjunction with the consoles," he went on. "The ability to record 64 channels of high quality audio on a basic PC is extremely cost-effective. No other digital console package would have enabled us to have this sort of recording capacity for the budget we had available. We then have the ability to playback the recorded audio back through the system and mix (or remix) on the three consoles we have at FoH, monitors and broadcast. It's a great training aid for us."
Finally, there was the budget to consider. "There were other consoles that had a lot of bells and whistles but were just totally out of our price range," said Patrick. "INNOVASON gave us everything we were looking for, and some more besides. We wanted a system that could bring us up to date with where the industry was going in terms of networked digital audio and INNOVASON was ahead of the game as far as I could tell, and yet only half the price of some of the other solutions available. INNOVASON has a great concept going and I look forward to supporting them in the future and hope that they continue to innovate and bring new concepts to the audio industry."
For more information please visit www.innovason.com
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