AUMC AV Blog

The AV system at the current AUMC is hodge-podge at best.

From the best I can tell, here is a brief history of the system (if I am wrong on a point, or you can add to the story, please let me know!):
My brother (Stephen) first got involved with AUMC because they needed a youth pastor, and he wanted to be one. While he was there, he and his friend Brandon became involved with the AV system. At that time, the sound board and computer were in the back of the sanctuary, and at some point, the computer was moved upstairs into the sound booth (while the sound board remained downstairs).

This is where I became involved. When I started attending UNT here in Denton, my brother dragged me along (somewhat willingly) to AUMC where I helped him run the sound/video. At the time, it was a two person job, one for sound (in the sanctuary) one for video (in the booth). Stephen finally graduated from UNT and went off to seminary, leaving me alone at AUMC. I tried having youth work the services with me, but they were un-reliable and under-trained (both my fault). At some point, the decision was made to move the sound board upstairs so that one person can run the entire service.

Somewhere along in here, Carter joined me in the quest for worship excellence. The two of us together could not find it, so we recruited David and Mike to help. Together, the four of us make a merry band of AV guys that fight the evil forces of dead batteries and blown cables... OK, I don't know where this is going, so I will move on.



The following is a walkthrough of our sound system, which for some reason, I feel like walking through it backwards. We start (or end?) at our speakers. We only have two working speakers in the sanctuary, even with the stage, one in each wall. You can see them on the left and right here:


(pay attention to the above photo, I will refer back to it several times) There are actually four more speakers in the sanctuary (in similar places in the wall, only towards the back of the sanctuary), but they are not hooked up, and are probably from when the building was first built.

Tracking back from the speakers we get to our amp, and before the amp comes our Mackie sound board.


It is a nice board, but because we never turn it off, it has developed a hum (at least SOMETHING along this line has created a hum). One AUX out goes to the computer, one goes to the hearing impaired system (rarely used), and one goes to the over flow room (the fellowship hall) (you can actually see this speaker directly below the sound board in the above picture through the window). Personally, I like the numbering system that is on there... but that is probably because I created it. Our wireless packs are on the left, channels 1-6 (designated W1-W6). Then two blank spots (one of them is now W7) and then the stage inputs, channels 9-20 (S1-S12). If you know where to look, you can see written on them "Podium", "Guitar", and "C-L" and "C-R" for the choir mics.

Moving on: we currently have 7 working wireless packs, six are Senheiser EW 100 series, and one Shure for the pastor.


Sadly, the Senheisers are in the 700MHz range, so I don't know if they will be good for long. W1-W4 are lapel mics, W5 is a hand held (which is lost), and W6 and W7 are what we call "Janet Jackson mics." These are the mics that fit around the back of your head and have a big black boom that comes out in front. These are used mostly by puppeteers when we have a puppet show.

Beyond taking pictures of the mic boxes on stage or the choir mics, that is the end of the audio portion of this tour. We will stop briefly to look at the lights, then move on.



Our lighting board is in a cabinet as we hardly ever use it. In total, there are twelve spotlights that point on stage, 4 on choir, 4 on mid stage, 4 on front stage (you can see them in the second picture behind the rafters). For the most part, we just turn these on and leave them on. Of course there is other lighting in the room, but that is all controlled by lighting switches in the back of the sanctuary. Like I said, that was only a brief stop, on to...

Video. As seen in the second picture, there is a large screen TV on stage and one hanging TV on each side of the sanctuary (you can't see the right one in the photo). There is also a large screen TV in the fellowship hall similar to the one in the sanctuary. These are controlled by a simple $50 RadioShack box:


Pressing each button will switch the S-Video signal between the camera (via the VCR), the DVD player, and the computer (the left hand button is broken). As you can see in the second photo, we have a little Sonly Handycam that does our live video. This is hooked via composite cable to the VCR which is hooked into the switcher. Our computer:


... runs through a TVator, which is a little box (sitting on top of the computer) that changes the VGA signal to S-Video. And yes, our computer is sitting on top of our old tape cassette recorder because the monitor cable to the right hand monitor is very short and I am way too cheap to buy an extension cable. The computer is running Windows Vista (was bought the week Vista was released because the old computer's power supply went out), and while I have heard about a lot of problems with Vista, we have never had any problems with it. It is running PowerPoint 2003, our presentation software of choice.

Well, that is about it! If you want to see more photos, click on the "photo" tab above and scroll down to "Feb_24...". Tomorrow I will be at church and will update some of the above information to be accurate (for example the product number of our Mackie board). If you have any questions/comments, please leave a comment below! We do our best with what we have, but if you have a suggestion to make something better, please let us know!

EDIT: Here are those product numbers I promised (hopefully this means something to someone, because they are just numbers to me):
Wireless Mic: Shure PGX4
Mixer: Mackie SR24.4-VLZ Pro
EQ: Rane ME 30B
Amp: Crown CE1000
Speakers: Yamaha

Matthew