Welcome Church in Woking has completed the first UK installation of Allen & Heath’s Avantis as part of a major audio renovation.
Supplied by AV company SFL, an Avantis console fitted with a Dante card for multi-track recording is now placed at FOH, while 14 ME-1 personal mixers are used for the band’s IEMs. With Allen & Heath’s range of ‘Everything I/O’ hardware options, Welcome Church also deploys GX4816 and DX168 expanders for further remote I/O expansion.
“As an organisation that has a lot of volunteers, we needed a system that had an easy-to-use, yet professional workflow but also had access to other, in-depth features and processing tools,” said Charles C, production lead at Welcome Church Woking. “Avantis has a similar workflow to the previous A&H desks we’ve owned, such as the GLD and SQ, but incomparable benefits such as the channel count, processing, displays and design, to name a few.”
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Andrew Hardiman, project manager at SFL, explained: “Console options from several major manufacturers were considered, however when the new Avantis console was announced, it clearly became the console of choice for Welcome Church. Filling the product gap between SQ and dLive, Avantis offers the church a natural progression from their GLD systems, direct compatibility with the existing ME-1 personal monitoring systems and the opportunity to later expand.”
Charles C continued: “We had three services to run to around 500 people per session that day, so we were under quite a bit of pressure to get the Avantis up and running in time. The desk was used pretty much straight out of the box and within 3 hours, we had unboxed, connected and configured the ME-1s, Dante outputs for recording and various other nuances and, most importantly, had a working mix.
“The Avantis didn’t miss a beat, the Continuity UI worked perfectly and once our sound engineering team have tuned their muscle memory to using it, I’m confident it will make our workflow more efficient.”
