Provision Audio Video Solutions has been working with Richland Creek Community Church for about 5 years, when the church decided to make a new facility adjoined to the main 15 year-old worship building. Company’s core AV designer Justin Linville and manager John Linden follow this project since its early stages of architectural design. They got involved in the early design planning, helping to literally shape the design of the room, and assisted the church in choosing systems and gear and use resources in an effective way.

Justin says: “The original architectural plan was basically a big rectangular box for a worship space. To make this more acoustically stable we needed to change the architecture a bit and add some features. The main worship center has a seating allocation of about 2500 people. This venue has some unique requirements and some particular ways this church likes to do things like distributing remote audio and video feeds in different parts of the building and pipe the live service audio out to the parking lot for the greeters who stand out there.”

“Numerous AV things happen throughout the building: there’s this main worship space, a recording suite behind the stage, a youth room with worship bands, lots of classrooms and overflow spaces, fellowship hall areas and ancillary rooms, all of which require AV integration and need to be tied together on a central system so primarily audio but also some video interaction to happen bi-directionally between any of these spaces and the existing building next door.”

“Since the early design work, we decided that the whole system of Richmond Creek Community Church would be built on a Dante network, so we’ve done really robust Dante connections throughout the entire facility: all of our main infrastructures are built around Dante to get audio in and out at various locations. There’s a lot of the design that looks very similar to network topology, because the project is so versatile, so we planned all components really meticulously. “

“Among other elements we had to consider was, for instance, that the worship center is actually a multi-purpose space. At the end of services on Sunday, they’ll take up all of the stackable chairs and use this room for school classes, sports and all kinds of activities. So the front of house audio position is actually on a rolling portable platform and there are two locations on the main floor with floor boxes where that rolling platform can go and plugin and then have that platform stored away safely.”

“There are many different elements here – like a massive speaker reinforcement system that covers this whole room, personal monitor mixing on stage for the bands and we get distributed audio through all those paths. We had do a lot of thinking and work-arounds, and navigate all options to make it all interact the way they want it to interact. To facilitate the design in this massive system we have here, we started working with the connectCAD plugin for Vectorworks, where I can take for example a 40 mic line input module and do a Multi-Connect and get all 40 of my connections in about 2 seconds, taking a lot of the guess work out. We’ve already got a labelling system call out where I throw the label onto each end of the cable that matches what’s on the schematic and so simplify and streamline communication.”

“Because of the way the project evolved over time, the AV infrastructure has also evolved over time and also the various industry offerings. After visiting this year’s Infocomm, we decided to use the Roland M5000 OHRCA system, the full size M5000 console and also 3 of the S4000 IO devices, so as to configure the input/output ratio however we want. Two of these are fully loaded with 40 mic line pre-amps and we also have an additional 24 analogue outputs, planned to grow up to 40 analogue outputs if we need to in the future. We’re using the M48 personal monitoring system, and all this is built on its proprietary REAC digital protocol.”

“We were discussing the best ways to map out that infrastructure and make it work with all the different contingencies, to maintain all the functionalities we need while reducing the budget – Roland has been really helpful in all that. Their console also interacts with the Dante network, so we could bring them online with the rest of the building – even without the presence of the console at the front of the room. “

“We installed Symmetrix processors because it’s at its core a Dante-based system, so we can take signals in, route them all over the place and then we have some different IO devices that attach to that Dante network. So we have something as simple as taking a typical hand-held microphone, plugging it into a wall plate and the wall plate itself is a Dante conversion device that takes that analogue mic input and converts it into a Dante stream which is then sent though a processor and subsequently sends out through the system speaker.”

“We’ve recently completed Phase #1 of the project, where the main focus was on audio, and the plan is to grow the video element over time, for the sake of budget allocation and resources.”