Road to Life Church broadcasts with Waves 

The Road to Life Church, an evangelical Christian megachurch located in the centre of Michigan City, Indiana, led by pastors Dave and Vanessa Gargano, is reinforcing its FOH, monitor and broadcast stations with a range of Waves products, including the eMotion LV1 Live Mixer. 

Road to Life’s main campus seats 1,500 and is equipped with three eMotion LV1 consoles. The church’s smaller campus in Chesterton, which currently seats 300, is served by a portable AV setup that is loaded in and taken down every Sunday.

Trevor Wright, technical director of RTL, describes the setup at the main church campus: ‘We are running a 64-channel eMotion LV1 mixer, a Waves SoundGrid Extreme Server, a DiGiGrid D SoundGrid-compatible audio interface, and a switch at mixer. All three LV1 mixers are connected to three DiGiGrid IOX audio interfaces on stage, and to a DiGiGrid MGB (a coaxial MIDI interface). We run keys and Ableton off Waves SoundGrid drivers, going into the MGB to split to the other two desks. The FOH board has four monitor screens, the monitor mixer has two monitor screens, and the broadcast board has two as well and an Icon Platform M fader controller with a D2 display screen. The monitor console is the master and shares all the I/O-out to the other mixers. At the FOH station is an Alienware X51 desktop, and the other two computers for broadcast and monitors are ThinkCenter i5. At our portable AV setup, loaded on Sundays at our Chesterton campus, we run an additional eMotion LV1 mixer (64 stereo channels) with two Dell P2418 HT touchscreens, connected to one DiGiGrid D and two DiGiGrid IOX audio interfaces.’

Explaining Road to Life’s decision to go with the eMotion LV1, Wright added: ‘We wanted to update to a larger-format console from our X32, and I wanted to separate FOH, monitors and broadcast. We have always had issues with the bands’ in-ear monitors as well as at front of house — not enough gain, EQ issues because of frequencies we had to cut due to room sound, gating on drums (drummers really hate gates) and over-compressed in-ears. So, we wanted a system that would help us solve all that. Being able to share I/Os across all three consoles without extra hardware was also very important.’

Impressed with the eMotion LV1’s performance so far, Wright continues: ‘Sound checks have been so much faster. One of our campuses is load in/out, and we used to spend about 20 minutes just EQing and compressing drums each week, because they never sounded the same with the X32. With the LV1, I set it up the first week and I haven’t had to think about it since. It helps create a consistent sound. Also, training volunteers on it has been really easy. The layouts make it very user-friendly even for people who have never mixed before. The sound quality is unmatched.’