Simeone chose Allen & Heath's Qu-Pac digital audio mixer to fill these needs. It offered the hands-off, automatic-mixer operation the church wanted and an iPad interface for operator control when needed. The rack-mount Qu-Pac could be hidden in the church's equipment closet and had ample DSP for everything from house equalization to reverb for the choir mics.
As part of the upgrade, Simeone added a pair of Tannoy VLS column loudspeakers and connected them to the Qu-Pac's main outputs. A Qu-Pac matrix output feeds the church's existing Bose loudspeakers (on delay) and another feeds their Listen Technologies' assistive listening system. Lab.gruppen amplifiers power the loudspeakers and the church has eight wireless microphones, six wired microphones, a Tascam CD recorder and a CD duplication system.
Simeone likes the Qu-Pac's three access levels which allow the church to make basic changes while preserving the core setups and he saved the entire Qu-Pac configuration on a memory stick. He commented: "The church achieved all of their goals from this upgrade and the Qu-Pac is now the heart of their system. It gave the church one-button operation for most services and iPad control from anywhere in the sanctuary when they need it. I trusted the Qu-Pac's sound quality based on my experience with Allen & Heath's classic analogue mixers, so the upgrade is really a whole new system."
(Jim Evans)
