Every year for the past five years, my church has “given” my town a fireworks display for Independence Day. It’s a pretty huge deal, and we always have a great response with our attendance averaging in the thousands. All in all, the event does well, but that’s because we put a lot into it.
One of our best moves yet was to purchase two mobile sound systems from B-52 Professional for use with this event. (We use one of them for smaller events throughout the year.)
We chose the Matrix-2000, which is a whole lot of awesome.
When we purchased our first Matrix, we put it through its paces. While our main sanctuary was being constructed, it became our primary sound system when we held services in our gym.
For those of you keeping score, the Matrix is capable of producing a full, rich sound—whether in a gym or open field—and yet is rugged enough to be hauled all over creation, even two years ago when our fireworks event was rained out.
Now, I’m not trying to sell anything. (I’m certainly not being paid by B-52!) I am, however, very happy with our mobile sound solution.
How about you?
Does your church do a lot of events that require a sound system?
What do you use?
Jared Erickson says
what kind of mixer you using with it?
Phil Schneider says
That’s a great question. Actually, we use several. For small events, we use this little mixer from Behringer:
http://www.behringer.com/EN/Products/USB.aspx
It’s not great in general, but for use as a PA during a small-scale church event or wedding in our gym, it’s perfect. (Side note: the mixer was not as useful for podcasting, which is what we bought it for.)
For our fireworks event, we have used two different mixers. One is a Peavey that’s made for use on the road (i.e. for bands and performance groups). It’s nice, but it’s so old that I can’t even link to it. And then, one year, while the Peavey was being repaired, we borrowed the mixer from our youth group, which was either an Allen & Heath or Soundcraft.
David Jones says
Hey, I run FOH at the church I attend, but we don’t do a lot of traveling (at least not me). But I do side work and I use the JBL/Crown (2) PRX 512M and (2) PRX 518. To lighten the load, I have an 8 space rack with an M-Audio Profire 2626 interface chained to a Focusrite Octopre Dynamic MkII for a total of 16 preamps then to my MacBook Pro running ProTools for my console/FX/DSP. I control ProTools with the Novation Zero MkII midi-controller and run it all through a DBX Driverack as my x-over, feedback elimination, and room control. Super fast to set up/tear down and all fits in a mini-van. Plus, I think it sounds amazing!!
Phil Schneider says
Woah! Pretty sweet set-up! Sounds like you do some pretty intense events.