One Backbone, Two Worship Spaces: Oakland Church's AVL Reset

Oakland Church in Johnstown, Pennsylvania holds its contemporary services downstairs and a more traditional service upstairs in the sanctuary. Over the years, issues had piled up in both rooms. Each space ran on its own equipment, streaming downstairs took setup every Sunday, and there wasn't a good way to stream from the sanctuary.

Oakland asked us to help them work through all of it with solutions that would hold up long term, and to tie both rooms into one system they could keep building on.

One Rack for the Whole Building

Most of the downstairs equipment now lives in a new wall-mounted AV rack, and that rack serves the entire building. The video switcher is there, with inputs and outputs coming in from both spaces. So is a Q-SYS Core, which handles PTZ camera control, livestream routing, and the audio processing for the new PA in the sanctuary.

Connecting the two rooms meant running new cable from downstairs across the building to the sanctuary. Along the way we worked through more than thirty years of unlabeled cable, and everything we touched is now labeled and documented.

We also put both rooms on the same console family. The contemporary and traditional teams both run Allen & Heath Qu series consoles now, so anyone trained in one room can mix in the other. It's a small console, but it does a lot.

Streaming From Either Room

Oakland wanted to stream from both spaces with one switcher and one encoder. We set that up in Q-SYS. On the church's control panel, a volunteer picks either the downstairs setup or the sanctuary setup, and Q-SYS changes the Dante audio routing and tells the switcher which feed to send to the Resi encoder. Nobody has to repatch anything to change rooms.

Downstairs, streaming used to start with setting up a small switcher every week and running cameras over long HDMI cables across the room, then packing it all up after service. The PTZ cameras are mounted on the walls now and wired back to the rack, so the team walks in and the cameras are already there.

The Sanctuary

Before this project, the sanctuary couldn't really stream. It now has its own PTZ camera with a dedicated control computer, a multiviewer tied back to the switcher downstairs, and a new ProPresenter rig that runs graphics on the in-room projector and the stream. Audio for the stream comes off the console over Dante and through Q-SYS.

For sound in the room, the priority was even coverage, so that preaching and singing come through clearly from the front pew to the back. QSC column speakers handle that well.

Front of house upstairs hadn't had an overhaul in a while. We cleaned it up and labeled the stage inputs so the team knows where to plug in when instruments come in, and the newer digital console is easier to run.

Downstairs Sound and Lighting

The downstairs room is a gym, so it was a live, echoey space. The JBL VRX system there is about ten years old and had never been tuned, even when it was first installed, so we tuned it. We also designed an acoustic panel layout and gave the church simple instructions, and Oakland's volunteers hung the panels themselves, which saved them money.

The lighting had a separate problem. The wireless DMX kept dropping out, and the moving lights would go haywire in the middle of a sermon. We ran hardwired DMX to a distribution unit, and that fixed it. The band can also mix their own in-ear monitors from their phones now.

Easier on the Team

We spent two weeks on site, a week in each room. The biggest difference for Oakland is how much easier the system is to run. Their volunteers care a lot about serving well, and now the setup makes sense to them, with the same consoles in both rooms and streaming handled from one control panel.

At Fresh Tech, we believe technology should elevate ministry, not complicate it, and we're glad Oakland's team gets to spend Sunday mornings serving instead of setting up.