High Kirk Presbyterian Church in Ballymena, Ireland has completed a major refurbishment project part of which has seen two Allen & Heath GLD digital mixers installed.
One of the GLD-112 desks is for live sound with the other for recording; there is also an AR2412 and two AR84 IO expanders. The two desks were fitted with M-Dante network cards, providing multitrack recording capabilities.
The choice of desks needed to meet the demands of a variety of operators with some using the desk one or two times a month, and professional sound engineers using the desk extensively and requiring greater functionality.
Head of Sound, Brian Adams commented: “During the demo, the more we looked at it, the more we realised how perfect the GLD was for our requirements, a single solution which totally eliminated our need for outboard equipment. Furthermore, all of our operators have their own preferred ‘layout’ but with 28 faders and four layers, it turns out that everyone can have the desk arranged to suit their personal preferences!”
The capacity to easily reconfigure the desk could lead to confusion, so to avoid this, one of the early agreements the team reached was how they would use the channel LCD displays.
“When it came to our purchasing decision, the LCD displays was one of the most important features of the desk,” added Adams. With multiple operators, and the need for different fader layouts, the last thing we wanted was a dependence on rolls of camera tape and Sharpies. Not only do the channel names change as we switch layers but we use the colour coding to great effect.”
The technical team was impressed that only a single Cat5e cable was required in the route to the FOH position.
Adams concluded: “During the refurbishment, we had to relocate to another part of the church for a few weeks, you can imagine how difficult this would have been with our old copper multis. With the GLD, we screwed a few hooks into the ceiling and ran in a couple of temporary Cat5e cables and were up and running within minutes!”
