Anthem Community Church in Gainesville, Fla., is affiliated with Atlanta-based North Point Ministries, among the largest churches in the United States. High-energy music is a characteristic of its worship, so when Anthem staff designed its new location, they sought out the best professional audio systems possible. They chose the Roland M-5000 OHRCA Digital Mixing Console as the hub of the church’s sound infrastructure.
“Anthem Community Church is a very tech-savvy church, and they had a very specific set of input/output requirements in mind,” recalls Jeremy Moyers, president of the Moyers Group, an AV integration company with offices in Cartersville, Ga., that has worked with the church since 2008. “For instance, they mix all of their monitors, including eight stereo channels just for IEMs, from the FOH console, so they required a lot of I/O and a lot of very configurable, flexible I/O in that console. Also, they will have a wide range of users running sound at the church -- from professional engineers to volunteers -- so whatever console [that was] selected would need to be extremely flexible when it came to how it’s operated. That narrowed down the field of candidates very quickly.”
Moyers says there were only two console candidates, and the Roland M-5000 was quickly selected. The M-5000 met all of the church’s requirements and then some, including 48-channels of playback and recording with no repatching necessary, and a dedicated app that supports remote control from an iPad with support for Retina displays for crystal-clear graphics. But it was the M-5000’s routing flexibility and user-friendliness that closed the deal.
“We were blown away by the flexibility that we could achieve in terms of signal path on the M-5000,” says Moyers, whose company is a 2014 Worship Facilities Solomon Awards winner. “They can configure that console any way they need, day to day, service to service.” For instance, different elements can be assigned to each of the console’s eight-fader banks, such as mix channels to one fader section and DCAs to a second fader section. And the ease-of-use design allows operators of any level of expertise to get exactly what they need out of the console. “Anyone can walk right up to this console and start using it, it’s that simple,” says Moyers, citing the console’s intuitive design and vector graphics for clear and vivid display of information. “That’s important for Anthem because they lean heavily on volunteers to run their systems.”
Moyers says another M-5000 is scheduled to be installed in another new-construction church building the firm is working on in Knoxville, Tenn., later this year, and Moyers Group is also considering the compact M-5000C console for other projects. “This was our first time with the Roland M-5000 and we were just blown away by what it can do,” he says.
