The topic comes up on occasion… online streaming. “We’ve been creating a podcast from the weekly message for seven years now — isn’t it time we finally sorted out a live online stream?” The response: “Yes! Great! Let’s do this! How hard can it be, with all the easy, turnkey solutions available these days?” And then… crickets… for weeks on end… until the next meeting, during which someone asks, “Hey — when are we finally going to start live online streaming?”
But on one very recent day, everything changed. It became clear to all of us that we no longer had a choice in the matter. We would be live-streaming on the internet whether we wanted to or not. And some churches went all-in, with high-end cameras and switchers and black boxes that delivered their moving visual images to the Internet. Others did the best they could with what they had… a high-def camcorder plugged into a laptop and lots of prayer. Thousands of churches went online for the first time ever in mid-March, and the one factor that required consideration by every one of them was audio. Sending a visual is awesome, but it must be accompanied by sound, and hopefully, if all goes well, it’s good quality sound that helps to convey the message. And I’ll bet that when the smoke clears, very few of these churches will stop streaming. Once you can get it up and running, why not keep doing it?
Your Mix is Awful
We’re not really going to talk about the visual part of the stream here. Our focus is, and always will be, the sound part. And you might be tempted to dismiss it as easy-peasy. “Just send the output of the mixer to the computer, and the viewers will have their sound!” In fact, I did recently advise a small church to do just that, in a desperate, last-minute, we’ve-gotta-get-some-sound-online-with-our-video scenario. But it’s far from optimal. In fact, it could actually be pretty bad. And here’s why: The mix coming from our FOH mixer is awful. You heard me right. It’s awful. It only tells half the story. We refer to the work that we do as “sound reinforcement” because that’s exactly what it is. Some of the musical elements on the platform are really loud… the drums, the screaming stack of Marshall amps, the bassist’s massive 8 x 10 Ampeg cabinet… you get the idea. But the vocals and the piano and the flautist just can’t compete with that kind of SPL, so we amplify them, too — through our front of house speakers. Then the congregation in the sanctuary hears a combination of both things — the loud instruments coming directly and acoustically from the platform, along with the sounds we’ve amplified to similar levels through our P.A. It all flows through the mixer, so it would be easy to presume that the output of the mixer has it all. But it doesn’t — the loud stuff is turned way down in our mix, because it’s already naturally loud. And the quiet stuff is turned way up in our mix, because it’s naturally quiet. So the output of the mixer is invariably heavy on vocals, acoustical instruments, and maybe some drums if we don’t have a basher behind the kit.
The Separate Mix
When our online congregants “tune in,” we want them to hear the whole mix, so we need to sort out a way to make that happen, and the optimal way to do it is with a separate mix, dedicated to the online stream. The big question: How do we create this additional mix? One option is to designate one of your console auxiliaries to the “streaming mix.” In one way, it’s an elegant solution — it enables us to send off a completely separate mix without deploying a second console. And it’s a tempting solution, because it doesn’t require an additional physical console, and if we don’t have a second console, we don’t need an additional engineer, right? That’s where the trouble arises. If we just set all the auxiliaries at unity gain in post-fader mode, we may as well just split off the mains — the relative blend of elements remains identical to front of house. We actually need a separate mix — a blend of elements that’s actually different and distinct from that which emanates from our front of house speakers.
And it’s also easy to reach the conclusion that, since we’ve processed all those signals to sound good in our sanctuary — EQ, compression, parallel processing, etc. — it will surely sound good in the online feed, right? Unfortunately no, for the same aforementioned reason: what sounds great in the big room at church may or may not sound good online. We simply need a completely different mix. And that doesn’t mean giving someone an iPad so they can adjust the blend of an auxiliary bus on our FOH console.
A second console producing a dedicated mix facilitates things that can’t be accomplished by just designating an auxiliary as the online mix. It facilitates the use of per-channel processing (EQ, dynamics, etc.) that is custom to the online mix. We’re literally creating an entire, separate mix, which allows us to make it sound great. And it also allows us to do all the other important things our FOH engineer does — muting stuff and handling catastrophes like dying transmitters and so forth. And a producer can pop on a pair of cans and call for the same kind of stuff they ask for in the sanctuary … “Can I get a little more bass and a little less snare?” We need to consider the means by which our signal is split away to our online console. In the old days, the answer is a splitter box — which splits the analog signal into two directions at the stage (one going to FOH and the other usually going to the monitor mixer). That solution is becoming rarer all the time. Most of us are at least dabbling with networked digital audio these days, and the good news is that it is vastly easier. Now we can use a network switch to send our signals over to another mixer.
We know how our P.A. speakers will respond when we send audio through them, but we cannot predict the response of the speakers owned by our online congregation, whether they be a laptop computer, a pair of earbuds or a nice living room home theater setup. The best bet here is to roughly adhere to what broadcasters have always done — keep the level consistent and under control. At least one stage of dynamic processing is a must, but in reality, it’s probably good to have multiple stages of level control on the output, with a brickwall limiter at the end of the chain. We don’t want to blast our online audience with a sudden, sharp burst of SPL. Mono is fine, but stereo’s a nice treat, and you might even eventually reach the sophistication of surround.
I’d strongly recommend mixing the outbound stream in acoustic isolation if possible. We mix based on what we hear, and if we can’t hear our online mix isolated away from the sound in the sanctuary, we won’t get it right. And headphones may not be enough. Setting up a pair of decent monitors in a small room away from the sanctuary to mix the stream would be best. The big churches that take it seriously build mix rooms with proper acoustics in order to get this right.
Connecting your FOH console’s headphone output to the 1/8” mic input of a laptop is an acceptable solution … for a week or two, when you are initially forced to start streaming and don’t have the necessary resources. And it’s also acceptable to move on to the slightly more sophisticated solution of designating an auxiliary bus on your console as an online mix, and designating a person to don headphones and create that mix in live, real-time with an iPad. But ultimately, to do it right will require an additional console and an additional mix engineer to ensure that the online congregation will get a clear, inspiring mix from our services.
John McJunkin is the chief engineer and staff producer in the studio at Grand Canyon University.
______________
ONLINE EXTRAS: In this video, Brandon Rinas of VUE Audiotechnik offers solid advice on audio-for-streaming in the house of worship environment. Check it out! https://fohonline.com/fohtv/video-of-the-week-tips-for-professional-audio-streaming-from-vues-brandon-rinas/
