| January 2007 | |
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DIGICO CONSOLES FUTURE PROOF PETERBOROUGH CHURCH |
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In 2004, Peterborough Community Church commissioned a multi-million pound, 80,000 square foot, purpose-built facility. Not only was this destined to be a prestigious new home for the church itself, but was also intended to provide a multi-purpose venue that could cater for the needs of both the local community and local business. In September 2006, this became a reality and, having kept in mind the original brief, the church’s new facility opened with what must be one of the highest quality audio visual systems in the UK worship market to date. Having made such a huge financial investment, a major priority was to ensure that the system be as future proof as possible. So local contractor B&H Sound Services performed an installation who’s backbone comprises DiGiCo digital mixing consoles – a D5 Live at front of house and a D1 live at the monitor position - feeding a Meyer Sound M2D line array. “We had one specific reason for going down the digital console route,” says the church’s Pete Charlton. “Our Sunday services are our main and most important element, but we also knew the venue needed to be multi-purpose and multi-use. “The digital route gives us the obvious advantage that we can rehearse with our worship bands at a convenient time during the week, save all those settings, do all sorts of events in between, come in on Sunday morning, recall the settings and away we go.” But why did they choose DiGiCo in particular? “We started investigating consoles two or three years ago when the D5 was relatively new,” continues Pete. “We looked at DiGiCo and a number of others. In the two years leading up to actual purchase, DiGiCo as a company supported us superbly in terms of evaluation consoles and that effectively made the decision for us. It was their commitment to us that secured the deal together with a console that is of a very high standard. It has great electronics, a great mic pre-amp and many other superb features “Additionally, in a venue of this size the console needed to have a good number of inputs. With the DiGiCo’s we can always lift that up, but we do a lot of in-ear monitoring, so we needed a lot of outputs as well and it was the benefit that we could run up to 28 individual monitor mixes from the D1 [with the latest V4 upgrade this can be increased to 36] that was another big seller for us.” The church knows that its system has the flexibility to handle a wide variety of events, and they are about to start publicising the available facilities. As previously mentioned, the aim is to attract local businesses to use the church for anything from a small conference to a large corporate event, as well as hosting larger Christian events, making it an extremely useful part of the local community. “But we’ve only been in the venue for 10 weeks, so we’re just doing church things at the moment,” smiles Pete. “But it will give us the ability to be as flexible as we can with future clients, offering them the highest level of equipment without jeopardising our main church events and we feel the size of the auditorium – with a final capacity of 1800 - is going to attract quite a big cross section of interest.” But in the end, what Peterborough Community Church is trying to do is provide something that people see as relevant to their everyday life that offers help and has an impact. To do that, it has understood that it needed to embrace today’s technological advances. “Our internal culture dictates that everything is very well presented and to television standards,” concludes Pete. “Our best way to make people feel comfortable and feel like this is relevant to them is to at least try and be on the same page technically. “We have to make it easy for people to understand the message, simple for them to join in and to feel part of it. Great sound and great vision are all part of that.”
Press Contacts: Sarah James at Gasoline Media |
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