Texas mega church installs Quantum7 quartet
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Working closely with integrator Paragon 360, the church installed three DiGiCo Quantum7 consoles in the 7,000-seat auditorium of its main campus in Plano, Texas, used for front of house, monitors, and broadcast, and one more Q7 at its newer Prosper, Texas campus, used to simultaneously handle front of house, monitors, and broadcast for the smaller yet substantial 1,500-seat sanctuary there.
The 140-acre Plano campus is also now fitted with an ample complement of I/O stations, including two SD-Racks backstage, along with an Orange Box loaded with DMI-DANTE 64@96 and DMI-OPTO Optocore cards for wireless microphone inputs. On stage are two more SD-Racks, plus an SD-Nano Rack for tracks, with yet another SD-Rack found in the church’s broadcast studio.
Also, SD-MiNi Racks are located at both FOH and monitors, with another SD-MiNi Rack in the amp room, and an SD-Nano Rack positioned up in the catwalk. The Prosper campus’ new Q7 is supported with two SD-Racks onstage and one more in the broadcast studio, plus an Orange Box for its wireless mics.
Mike Smith, Prestonwood Baptist Church’s live production lead and lead audio engineer, “As soon as I came on staff, we started talking about doing the console switchover, and we already had an SD5 in our Student Ministry Building, which just had opened up right after I came on staff. Plus, my boss, Bryan Bailey, came out of First Baptist Dallas and they were all DiGiCo over there. So it just made sense to stay with DiGiCo.”
Smith cites the configurability and high I/O counts the Q7s afforded the church: “We have a big service, a full choir and orchestra, and lots of inputs, so we needed a big input count, and with auxes and submixes we’re pushing 48 outputs,” he says. “The monitor desk runs over 50 outputs and we’re running close to 200 inputs. We’ve multed all 15 vocal channels and split them into two channels, which allow us to have separate mixes.”
And come Christmas, the production becomes even larger. “We do a really big Christmas programme every year called Gift of Christmas,” he explains. “It's like a Broadway-level ticketed event. It's in addition to our normal services and is massive; we have a full percussion rig and a whole rhythm section with drums and two guitar players and full tracks. Fortunately, the console can handle a boatload of inputs and outputs to accomplish what we need. You can make the console do whatever you want. The macros are super powerful and the Waves integration is very helpful.”
The installation was able to utilise much of the existing fibre infrastructure for the Optocore network, with a few additional strands installed by Paragon 360 to accommodate the Q7s’ bandwidth requirements.
