In just four years, Elevation Church in Charlotte, N.C. has grown from a congregation of 121 attending a portable service in the atrium at Providence High School (PHS) to a congregation of over 5,000 attending services at a former Ashley Furniture Warehouse, the McGlohon Theatre, and the original PHS location's 800-seat auditorium.
Recently, Elevation donated a permanent sound system to PHS, with the understanding that the school would use it every Sunday for church services. Audio Ethics designed and installed the system, relying on an Ashly ne4400 DSP to interface the school's analog outputs and the church's EtherSound outputs with the new d&b amplifier's AES/EBU inputs.
There were three goals for the permanent system at PHS. First, the church wanted to expedite the setup and tear-down for its series of Sunday services, which had previously been a laborious, multi-hour process involving several dedicated volunteers. Second, it wanted to "level the playing field" across its multiple campuses so that attendees at one site experienced the same multi-media presentation as attendees at the other sites. The old PHS system was, in the words of Audio Ethics project manager and frequent Elevation PHS FOH mixer Trey Blair, "okay, but far from great." Third, Elevation wanted to build a system that would benefit the performances and meetings held in the school auditorium.
The new system met all three goals under budget. On the stage, a new multi-pin snake with pre-labeled inputs for the live band connects to three Yamaha SB168 input boxes that present an EtherSound signal to a wall plate at the FOH position. A Yamaha M7CL digital mixing console plugs into the plate and outputs EtherSound to a new amp rack loaded with d&b D12 and D6 amplifiers configured to drive a new left and right d&b T-series line array, with T10 center fill and B2 subs.
For Blair, the trick was to unite the school's analog signal with the church's EtherSound signal for AES/EBU digital input to the amps in a way that was transparent to both the school and the church.
Technicians for both the school and the church needed to be able to turn the system on and go, without worrying about switching things over "by hand. Apart from Ashly," added Blair, "only two other companies make something that would unite those three protocols," neither of which, Blair said, were suited to the needs of this project. "All of my experiences with Ashly have been positive, and I knew the ne4400 would do the trick, so we went with it."
The Ashly ne4400 is a network-enabled DSP with four standard analog inputs and outputs. Four option bays support network audio (such as EtherSound), digital AES/EBU, and microphone preamps. Programming the ne4400, Blair added, was easy. "With the unit and my laptop plugged into the school's network, it was a simple matter to navigate to it and ‘get inside,'" said Blair. "And it sounds absolutely transparent. I know, because we had the system on line for a few weeks before we added the Ashly, and the ‘after' sounds no different than the ‘before.' I recommend Ashly for anyone who needs analog, EtherSound, and AES/EBU to play nicely together."
