After a severe storm flooded their sanctuary, Castle Hills Church of San Antonio, Texas, undertook a major rebuilding project that transformed a traditional worship space to contemporary and added a modern AV system with an Allen & Heath dLive S Class Digital Mixing System at FOH and an ME-1 Personal Mixing System at monitors.
Castle Hills’ new worship center was a significant departure from their previous space so the church partnered with Skylark AV of Oklahoma City to design and install their new AV and lighting package and help them develop a master plan for this project and future expansion.
Tim Vencil, Castle Hills Technical Director explained the church’s mixer choice, “We had been using a smaller digital mixer. But, for the new worship space, we needed more than just a bigger board. I wanted an ‘infrastructure’ that would support our in-ear system, our streaming broadcast and everything else in the room.” After research and consultations with other engineers, Vencil chose the dLive S7000 Surface and DM64 MixRack with a DX168 Expander at FOH for the church’s wireless mic system.
“I’ve never worked on a console that’s this flexible,” said Vencil. “I use the left and right banks for inputs with the center bank as my outputs. And I use the layers as groups. We only have one service style at the moment but I use scenes for different songs. And, I love the color coding options on the channel strips.”
Vencil uses the dLive’s onboard EQ, reverbs, delays and de-essers. “I’ve been really happy with the built-in effects,” he said. “I’ve found some great reverbs and I love the multi-band compressor. We’re also using the dLive Waves card to run some Waves effects from a MacBook Pro and the latency is really low.”
For its musicians’ in-ear monitors, Castle Hills has 16 Allen & Heath ME-1s with an ME-U Hub. “The headroom in the ME system is awesome and I was blown away by how crisp and clean they sound,” said Vencil. “And, when you move to 40 channels and the ability to do groups, that was a game-changer for us.”
