WorshipCentral

At my local church in Stebbing we have a ls9-16. It's great for what we want. But it osn't have a touch screen which can be annoying! But a ls9 is a good desk for it's target audience.

In short, I'd say it would be worth teaching them how to work with a digital desk. It obviously depends what one you go for, but the learning curve isn't that steep if it's just the basics you're dealing with - and things like FX and dynamics control could come in later in training until they've mastered the basics. If you haven't got much outboard at the moment then that's another advantage in my mind - all comes in the desk, so there's not much sitting around unused!

In fact, thinking about it, you might not even need to teach them how to use dynamics and fx if things stay pretty similar - if you set up a load of presets for different people / instruments, they can just call them up as and when they need them :) I haven't done that before so I'm not sure how well it'd work in practice, but might be worth a shot!

The disadvantage is of course there's simply more to go wrong on a digital desk. That was generally more of a concern 10 years ago than it is now and the new ones seem pretty reliable (seen stuff chucked at an ls9 pretty hard and it was fine - not deliberately though!) but as it ages in a few years time you might get things like stuck faders and digital controls not working properly. Stuff which can be fixed by a quick soldering job on an analogue desk will probably take a lot longer / cost a lot more to fix with a digital variety. That said, I'm pretty sure you can expect a good few years of service before things start to play up, if they do at all - there's been lots of the 01V's around on ebay recently that claim to be in perfect working order, and they're a good few years old now! I just thought I'd mention it because it's something to watch out for.

As for what desk, I'm a huge fan of the Midas XL8... Coming down from dreamland however... Never used the 32 channel one but the 16 channel LS9 seems like a good desk to me. Can't fault the sound quality, used it without reading the manual (I've used other digital desks before, but I did find it dead easy to use), and of course you get all the dynamics and fx control you need. That said, apart from an 01V, LS9 and 328 (unless you count a couple of minutes playing with a PM5D!) I haven't had much experience with the digital variety. Moving away from Yamaha, the 328 was nice for what it was, really easy to use and sounded decent enough - but whoever designed it decided they'd only put a "next" button on (not a previous) for scrolling through 999 presets. I've never got my head around that...

(I'm a Worship Pastor not a Sound-Engineer so forgive me my possible uneducated commend)

We've just changed our analogue set with a digital one (mixer and processors). At the moment (after 6 months of use) I'm still in doubt if this was the right decision (with more feelings towards 'not so good'). In our church we have a team of people who are all quite experienced, one of them even a professional sound-engineer. They all could use our analogue set without a problem (and with good sounding result) but most of them still have a lot of difficulties in using the new set (not the pro, he advised us to use this set, and has no problem with it).

One of the main problems is that there are different ways to achieve the same thing. Because all this parameters are hidden somewhere in the desk and/or the processors it is difficult to respond quickly to a problem (like a basic thing such as a mic that's not working, I've been told that there can be a multitude of reasons why it isn't working).

I also worry about new people who want to get involved in our tech-team. Because you need to know a lot more of the mixing console than with an analogue one (for basic operation, I'm not even thinking about effects or EQs) I'm afraid it will take a lot more time to get new people trained on the set.

One the other side: the digital set should make it possible to work with presets which should make working with sound a bit easier (we didn't took the time to make good presets but will do so in the next month).
Also, we have a special mini-mixer for if only one or two mics are needed. It uses the same processors, etc., but is very easy to work with. We've made a 10 step manual for dummies, they can use this mini-console without a problem.

Hmmm...

I had an unused 328 kicking around in a box (left over from a project I once worked on) and upgraded our church from a Spirit Folio to the 328 - one small step for me but quite a leap for our church! The sound is much better, plus it has the added benefit of being easy to use, metering on each channel, FX processors, etc.

However, I was reticent to make the move because, if for any reason the 328 goes wrong mid-session then you need to re-boot it which can take a minute! With an analogue desk, you're up and running straight away. However, our church services aren't mission critical (and perhaps rightly so?) so it's no big problem. The 328 is going fine and it does look flashier too! ;)

Oh yes, I have a spare 328 with a broken power supply if anyone wants it. The power supply is quite expensive to get repaired (about £250) but then you get a digital desk for £250 which may be no bad thing! Hit me up if you're interested.

Now, all I need to do is find the money in our poor parish church to upgrade our speakers. I'd love to get some d&b e12s and subs (I know, I know, I'm aiming high). Any of you in big wealthy churches want to help out? Well, there's no harm in asking right?? :)

I'll come back to the analog versus digital debate..

I'd like to talk about consoles...

The yamaha m7cl is a great desk but costs about £15k.if you are doing a full band everyweek this could be the desk for you. The ls9 is also a great desk.. However its a bit more fiddly and you need more menu pages. doesn't include a matrix or dca's

However roland have just launched this new range of desks that include digital multicores for a great price..(about the same as an ls9/32 The roland m-400 is a great surface to mix on .. easier than an ls9 and sounds great as well.. It comes in a standard package with 2 multicore stage boxes.. each with 16 inputs and 8 returns.. All the mulicore needs is 4 lines of cat5 (2 as backup) This makes life really easy..

The desk was in the late night worship venue at soul survivor and it sounded great..

Other features include ability to take a single cat5 feed out into a computer and multitrack record all the audio.. also has 8 dcas.. matrix etc etc

here's the link to the roland website. http://www.rolandsystemsgroup.net/en/0130.htm

Everything else in the market in digital desks is generally too expensive for churches..

Back to analog versus digital.. I think now the prices of digital desks dropping you'd be silly to buy a brand new analogue desk and all the outboard.. By the time you buy the desk, effects, outboard you're at the same price as digital.

For me digital makes mixing much easier.. For our 9am traditional service the verger walks in recalls scene 9 and the 1 speech mic turns on . Thats all he needs. every other channel mutes.. Easy

And because we have different styles of services it's easy to go back to whatever mix you had from the previous week and start from there.. Also if the worship leaders find a guitar eq they really like it's easy to recall just that feature... This is especially usefull with short sound check times or quick changeovers between services..

If you're church is only 100 people in a school hall with 1 man and an acoustic guitar every week then maybe a small 12 channel analog £200 desk is probably what you need. If you are church with 300 people with a full band every week then maybe you should be looking at the ls9 or the roland m-400

M

We're just going through the whole "analogue vs Digital" thing at the moment, We've landed on the side of digital which I'm pleased about.
We're have a congregation of about 300-350 on a Sunday morning and we have various services and events throughout the week. The main reason we are going digital is for the ability to 'save' services, the problem we have is that the sound guys on Sunday set up the service more or less but then through the week all the different people who use it fiddle with bits and by Sunday again they have to spend about half an hour working out what's been changed because it's a very temperamental system. With digital they'll be able to start from the same benchmark every week (my worry then is that they won't adjust anything at all even if it needs it!)

After looking through various options we're going for the Mackie TT24 (http://www.mackie.com/products/tt24/) which looks good for what we need and is within our budget. does anyone have any experience of this mixer?

Rich

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www.allsaintslive.com

Funny you should mention the TT24 - I've just spent two weeks in the States getting my head round one, and dare I say it, it wasn't an all-joy experience. For the budget it is quite a good desk, the DSP (where available) is powerful and accurate, The onboard FX are Alesis-nanoverb level, so very basic but just about workable with - you can of course add an expansion card...
Proper sized faders and reasonably easy access to 90% of the features within 3 button presses is pretty good I reckon. Touch screen isn't the most accurate I've ever come across, but if you have a PC/laptopp hooked up in "follow" mode then you can easily by-pass this niggle.

My biggest irritation with the desk are the simple things that aren't present. Most important being a stable operating software! The majority of the first 2 days faults with this desk where evntually tracked down to it having "old" software on. A quick trawl of Mackie's website soon fixed that! However some of the things I wanted to do with the system won't be possible until the much awaited v1.7 release sometime in whenever...

Second is the distribution of DSP - If you have a relatively complicated FOH set up and try to use the Matricies - you don't get any EQ control on the outputs... And if you use the LCR mixing option and your centre fill isn't physically in line with L and R then you have to use up a Matrix / Group output just to put the delay in. As for what happens if you need a different EQ for the feed to the delay speakers at the back of the hall - well - you're just gonna have to do it in outboard!!! Or you could buy an expansion card...

I also at no time during my visit to that church managed to get any of the digital I/O to work. Which is upsetting as it is a grossly under-used resource on this console. (No routing options!) I hope on my next visit to explore what happens when I hook up an Alesis HD24 Hard Disc Recorder to the ADAT I/O on the console as it would make an incrediblly cost effective means of multi-track recording the service.

Rich - are you getting the Mackie digital snake with the desk? If not I hope you are aware that the most obvious settings for a channel - the pre-amp gains are NOT saveable!!! So you'll have to make a mark-up list in case people fiddle!

Otherwise it's a dead handy desk to use, and it is remarkably easy to adapt analog practices to, but it does have gaping holes in it's resources. You will get round them but there will be some exciting wiring going on in the back of the desk! The church I was at ended up running L+R out of the desk into a cross-over to source a feed for the subs, the remaining High frequency signals where then returned to the desk to be EQ'd by Input channel EQs and delayed by Matrixes before being sent to the relevant amps. The signal flow diagram for this place is a thing of beauty!

OK. I Tech-talk too much. Feel free to come back if you have any other questions about it. :)
Afraid I can't really make too many suggestion in this price bracket as I don't have alot of experience in it - but I do now know the TT24!

G

If you mic the kick drum, God will come.

Oh and you need to check out http://forums.mackie.com/scripts/forum/ultima...
Before you buy... There are still some pretty funky bugs in the current software release! (DSP on groups, Recall filters, etc...)

Health and Happiness!

G

If you mic the kick drum, God will come.

We've just changed over from analogue to digital, and have had the same problem as Bart - a steep learning curve for anyone without a good foundation in sound engineering.

The attraction was that it would make life easier in that everything could be preset for different musicians/situations, but that hasn't seemed to be as user-friendly as we thought?

I would think long and hard about how easily your team will adapt to the change...

Ross

Only if you kick the drum mic, will God come.

No advice here - but, by coincidence, yesterday I was talking to an experienced sound engineer who told me he'd crashed an LS9. Did the sound check, got a great mix then muted all the stage channels to play background music but when the band came on and stepped up to the mics nothing would un-mute - the whole surface had frozen. Only solution was power down and on again! Surprised me as I'd always found Yamaha consoles bullet proof!

Andrew