Bellevue Baptist Church, the largest house of worship in Memphis and one of the leading churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, recently finished a complete renovation of its audio systems, which also included extensive acoustical work throughout the sanctuary.
The project was led by the church’s longtime systems integration partner, Springfield, Mo.-based Paragon 360, which had previously designed and installed the scenic, lighting and video systems there.
The new installation, in the church’s 6,800-seat main sanctuary in the suburb of Cordova, features three DiGiCo Quantum7 consoles deployed at FOH, monitors and broadcast.
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In addition, an SD12 console is now also deployed in church’s fellowship hall, wrapping up what Mark Coble, audio/acoustics design and commissioning lead for Paragon 360, called “a full DiGiCo solution for the church.”
“When looking to update its loudspeakers and consoles, the church required a mixing system with a high channel count,” said Coble.
Coble cited the redundancy of the Quantum7’s dual processing engines, and the fact that the entire system runs at 96 kHz, including multitracking for virtual soundcheck at FOH and importing to ProTools in the broadcast control room.
“The church wanted a system that could last up to 20 years,” he said.
Inside Bellevue Baptist Church
In the main Bellevue Baptist Church worship center, two fully loaded 32-bit Mic Preamp-equipped SD-Racks with custom distribution are located onstage. Two additional SD-Racks are found offstage to take input from all of the existing floor pocket inputs, while a fifth rack, an SD-MiNi, is parked at FOH.
Two more SD-Racks are in the broadcast suite for capturing local sources and distribution of signals via analog and AES, said Coble. An SD-Rack with custom distribution is also located on the fellowship hall stage and one SD-MiNi Rack is in the offstage room for system drive, he said.
A BroaMan Optocore AutoRouter is managing all the SD-Racks via fiberoptic connectivity and allows the entire campus to be interconnected. All of the consoles can ‘see’ all the racks, providing the ultimate in flexibility.
A pair of DiGiGrid MGR units are being used to support 128 channels of recording and playback for virtual soundcheck at both FOH and monitors. And a DiGiCo Orange Box is an on/off ramp for Dante within the system to support the church’s Axient wireless microphones and any other Dante devices that are on the network.
Among other goals, the church sought to better accommodate its wide variety of worship music styles.
“At Bellevue, we have a couple of different styles of music,” said technical director Caleb New. “One style includes a typical rhythm section with a small group of vocalists consistent with what most people think of when they hear Contemporary worship music. The other style includes a full 50-piece orchestra with a 300-member choir and a 12- to 16-member praise team.
“These two service types will typically do similar songs but with very different instrumentation. We had maxed out our previous digital consoles and would constantly unpatch and reuse channels in order to handle all of our usual inputs and whatever special channels were needed for that week,” he said.
There were some very specific workflow and technical challenges that the church sought to meet. One was addressing how the broadcast console would be able to have full access to the inputs from the worship center and fellowship hall.
The process of switching venues was previously done through a large analog patch bay, which was time consuming and prone to errors in patching and difficulty in troubleshooting.
Paragon 360’s solution was to design the console system with an Optocore auto-router so that the fellowship hall could live on the same fiber loop as the worship-center consoles, giving the broadcast console full access to all available inputs at any time.
“At the monitor console, we’re able to easily handle 20 stereo IEM mixes on top of a few wedge mixes and a 40-channel personal monitoring system that uses a combination of direct output and aux mixes,” said New.
“At front of house and broadcast, the ability to use snapshots and presets has really streamlined our workflow as we switch out between different services and musicians,” he said.
The project was also notable for the time constraints under which it had to be completed.
“We had to completely decommission the old system with its traditional three-way splitters and install the new DiGiCo system in the main sanctuary within four days so the church could continue to operate on its normal schedule,” said Coble. “Not easy, but we did it.”
“It’s able to handle anything we’ve thrown at it and it sounds great,” said New. “Both our musicians and members of our congregation were able to tell a positive difference from week one on the new consoles.”
