Shawn Smith is Dream City's media director. He says the church previously mixed on a large, analogue setup that had 112 inputs with 24 returns and took up 16ft of mix booth space. However, even this high channel count was barely adequate for Dream City's elaborate holiday pageants which may use 110 or more audio channels. The church's previous analogue mixer required several operators for these large productions.
Clearwing Systems Integration of Phoenix provided Dream City's new dLive mixers. Clearwing's Nick Dressler says the church evaluated several digital mixers but chose the dLive because it gave them all of the features and capabilities they wanted in a great sounding mixer that met the church's budget. Dream City uses one of its dLive S7000s for its weekly services and adds the second for holiday pageants and other large productions. Services at the church's Phoenix location are mixed on the dLive and broadcast to its Scottsdale and Glendale locations and the church provides internet streaming on its website.
The church's systems engineer Sherman Jerrell says he and the volunteers are learning more about the dLive and using more of its features all the time. They use compression, EQ and reverb on selected voices and gates on drum mics. They save scenes for dramatic presentations and use layers for aux mixes sent to the band's ME-1 Personal Mixers and for eight additional wireless in-ear mixes for the vocalists. Jerrell loves the dLive's drag-n-drop displays which make it easy to mix the live auditorium sound while coordinating the broadcast. "I can hop on the console and immediately see what's happening," he says.
(Jim Evans)
