“The first time I put on a Bolero and talked on it, I was blown away at the audio quality.” Prestonwood Baptist Church Director of Media Bryan Bailey is gushing about the expansion of the Dallas, Texas church’s Riedel Bolero wireless intercom system. Prestonwood recently upgraded from a stand-alone Bolero system to an expansive Riedel deployment. The enhanced system adds a full Artist intercom ecosystem, including an Artist-1024 matrix, various SmartPanels plus additional Bolero beltpacks and antennas.
The Riedel Bolero and Artist intercom systems have received the Church Production Road Tested certification.
Bailey says it’s all now a vital part of their communications. “If I'm the producer or maybe the director down in the control room, I have to be able to punch up and talk directly to the musical director on stage and have back-and-forth communication with that person,” he explains. “So, when he's talking to the band and the worship leader on stage, we are hearing everything he says. We don't have to rely directly on our broadcast engineer to make sure he turns that way up.”
The church’s Engineer in Charge, Will Schaefer, says the system gives him the flexibility of 32 different cross points he can touch on a single page to drill down to a specific operator or party lines if needed. “It's not unusual on Sunday morning for somebody to say, ‘Hey, can I get a button that does this?’ Or, ‘Hey, can you change this button to do that?’ I'm able to very quickly open what's currently on the comm system, make a couple of mouse clicks to adjust anything, put any port wherever I want, and then deploy just that change without interrupting the entire comm system. I can make that change comfortably during the middle of a production without affecting anybody's microphone, nobody will know that it happened other than the end user that asked for it,” he says.
Before the installation, the church experienced wireless transmission and reception challenges around campus. Bailey says the new range difference was very noticeable during a recent church campus-wide event. “We just had a large conference two weekends ago where I was acting as a floor producer and I needed to be able to be on the worship center stage in the house, and then I needed to walk across campus to manage a breakout session that we were streaming and running video back to our main control room for, and I never lost signal. I was able to communicate with the people in the control room, the people in the other venue perfectly the entire time,” he enthuses.
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