Munich, Germany (June 14, 2021)—With the amount of cutting-edge AV technology being used in modern houses of worship, sometimes it’s almost like going to church in a nightclub. For International Christian Fellowship parishioners in Munich, however, that’s exactly where they go to worship, as their Sunday services are held at Neuraum, a 2,400-capacity nightclub. That, in turn means that the church’s production team loads-in and tears down its system every week, including an Allen & Heath dLive system in use since the beginning of 2019.
Marc Deisen, ICF Munich’s head of audio, noted, “Since we set up and tear down every Sunday, we needed a lightweight and flexible system; we also wanted a straightforward and intuitive control surface.” As a result, the team employs a dLive S5000 Surface and a DM48 MixRack, chosen for their analog-like signal flow. Additional onstage I/O is provided by a pair of daisy-chained DX168s, and a 128-channel Dante card provides digital I/O for wireless microphones, virtual soundchecks and general audio distribution throughout the venue.
The ICF Munich setup is often moved to larger venues for the major Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter. For last year’s Christmas Celebrations, they moved to the Munich Showpalast. Due to the distance between the stage and the mixing position, two fibreACE cards were deployed to provide a secure fiber optic connection between the DM48 and the S5000 at FOH. “The fibreACE expansion cards were plug and play, and in general the dLive system has always performed solidly,” reports Deisen.
Remote-Mixing an Event 1,400 Miles Away
Going by the recommendation of the Munich team, another International Christian Fellowship branch—ICF Herrenberg—opted for a similar setup in 2020, partnering an Allen & Heath dLive C3500 Surface at FOH with a CDM48 MixRack onstage. “As a test setup, we had been given an Allen & Heath Avantis in addition to the dLive, but we needed 10 stereo in-ear mixes for the band, various subgroups and three more aux paths for the stream, as well as a matrix. The Avantis is a great console, but due to the amount of output paths, we finally decided on the dLive,” explains head of audio Phillipp Reineboth.
As in Munich, the services at ICF Herrenberg are supervised by volunteers from the congregation, most of whom do not have a professional technical background. “I wanted to provide our audio team with a well-configured setup that can also be operated by lay people,” Reineboth said. Accordingly, ICF Herrenberg chose a dLive C3500 system based on positive feedback from ICF Munich.
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