Featured Installation: Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church
To meet his second goal, we went with Odum to several trade shows to assist in finding a console that would do all that he wanted.
The driving factor in Fair Oaks’ need for flexibility was back-to-back Sunday worship services which varied greatly from each other, as well as a large variety of mid-week events, all with different needs.
Because of his desire for ultimate flexibility, we focused primarily on digital consoles. As we began to narrow down the field, we found that some manufacturers would skirt around questions of reliability and redundancy. Odum felt that he could not justify spending such a large portion of the church’s resources on a digital console that was not going to be reliable, so we began to steer our search away from the digital world and towards a large-format analog desk. However, a fortuitous meeting with Solid State Logic turned our attention back towards a digital console. We received a demo on SSL’s C100, a digital console built for broadcast. Odum immediately felt like this was the solution we were looking for. A few of the features that stood out:
- A flexible backend which provided a large amount of I/O. The console as it was installed has 48 mic preamps, 24 analog in/out, 128 digital AES in/out, and 128 MADI in/out, with plenty of room for additional cards should they need more in the future.
- 64 channels, each of which has the following DSP:
- Low and High pass filters
- 4 band sweepable, fully parametric EQ
- Compressor
- Gate
- Delay
- Two direct outputs
- Programmable controls on the work surface that helped make the digital desk “feel more analog.”
- 24 Auxiliary busses which gave us plenty of space for wedge mixes, effects and recording sends.
- 24 Utility busses, 16 of which were used for sends to an Aviom system for In-Ear monitoring.
- 16 Master Fader Groups (VCAs) and 8 stereo Audio Sub Groups
Because the C100 was designed for use in broadcast facilities, many of which operate around the clock, redundancy was built in to all facets of the console: redundant power supplies in both the work surface and the processing core, redundant DSP in the processing core, and redundant controls on the work surface. In the case of failure of any one of these, those functions would immediately transfer to the redundant counterpart with no loss of audio or interruption of control. Also, all of the console’s parameters are instantly recallable, giving the operator the ability to program a show (read: worship service) in advance and then recall that show at the touch of a button. The bottom line was that this was exactly what Fair Oaks was looking for.