PROJECTS
Consistency in Action Action Church has expanded to four campuses in less than five years. James Cooke discovers how AVL is managed at this rapidly growing church ACTION CHURCH SPRUNG TO LIFE at the start of 2014 with its first service taking place at Winter Springs High School near Orlando, Florida. In the five years since, Action Church has grown at an extraordinary rate, with campuses in nearby Oviedo and Sanford opening in 2016 and 2017, respectively. Then, in late 2018, the church inaugurated its purpose-built Winter Park Campus, which serves as Action’s dedicated broadcast campus. John Williams joined the church as music director during its third year. His role includes responsibility for the audio systems, as well as aspects of video and lighting. ‘When I started, one of the first things I noticed was that the two campuses at the time – Winter Springs and Oviedo – had Avid SC48 consoles, and another had been purchased for the upcoming Sanford facility,’ Williams recalls. ‘When it came to planning our new, dedicated broadcast facility at Winter Park, the SC48 unfortunately wasn’t going to cut it in terms of connectivity and I/O options. ‘I previously worked as a systems integrator and had experience with Allen & Heath consoles. I knew that they had addressed a lot of the issues from the iLive and I had heard a lot of good things about the newer dLive systems. We explored
The dLive in action at Winter Park our options and looked at what another reputable manufacturer had to offer too, but they were too expensive for our budget as we required connections for Dante and MADI, and the costs of those soon add up. While budget isn’t our biggest concern, we still need to
20 WORSHIP AVL March–April 2019
spread what money we have over the entire audio, video and lighting setups, and across all four sites. Therefore, we needed to look into what else was available.’ As a former systems integrator, Williams was no stranger to the world of pro AV trade shows.
He attended InfoComm 2017 in Orlando, along with others from Action Church, to find out exactly what was on offer in terms of mixing consoles. ‘The guys at Action Church had heard bad things about Allen & Heath consoles due to the iLive,’
