Eagle Brook Church welcomes DiGiCo’s new Quantum225 console
Eagle Brook Church welcomes DiGiCo’s new Quantum225 console
Eagle Brook Church has 10 locations around its Lino Lakes, Minnesota main campus in the Minneapolis–St Paul area, and collectively hosts over 25,000 worshippers a week. As part of a renovation that saw the installation of a new videowall system and L-Acoustics A10-based PA system, the Ham Lake church – Eagle Brook’s newest location – has reportedly become one of the first houses of worship to implement DiGiCo’s new Quantum225 console, where it is paired with the Dante-specific DiGiCo DQ-Rack.
“They wanted to push the envelope with this installation, and we had been talking to them about the Quantum225 ever since we had heard about it,” said Cameron Fries, project manager for systems integrator Summit Integrated Systems. “The Q225 is the console they wanted to use to make the leap into the next generation of technology. It’s a perfect fit for them. It’s compact but it has all of the features and functionality of the larger Quantum338, flexible routing and function assignment, and a great user interface and intuitive operation.”
Eagle Brook, which typically deploys an Optocore-based cabling infrastructure at its campuses, this time chose to use a Dante network for Ham Lake’s audio, a good match for DiGiCo’s Dante-specific DQ-Rack, which provides all of the power of the larger SD-Racks but in a more compact unit, along with the flexibility of Audinate’s Dante protocol. “This new campus is heavily Dante, so it was also smart to move to the DiGiCo DQ-Rack, which keeps it an all-Dante signal infrastructure,” added Matt Beckstrom, Eagle Brook Church’s audio systems engineer. “For instance, we’re going over Dante right from the DQ-Rack to the in-ear monitors onstage.”
In addition, connection to the Q225 via the console’s DMI-DANTE64@96 card means that all inputs and outputs on the racks can be accessed at both 48kHz and 96kHz. The DQ-Rack is also equipped with dual redundant power supplies as standard.
While much about the Q225 was immediately familiar for Beckstrom, “the added power of Quantum processing was very welcome and there’s a lot of headroom for the church’s mix staff to grow into. For now, they’re continuing to use the Waves processing integrated into the Q225, but are looking forward to getting into Mustard and Spice Rack processing in the very near future.”
He said that familiarity with DiGiCo systems made installing the new Q225 themselves, with relatively minimal assistance from Summit, a simple and straightforward process. “That kind of simplicity is especially important for churches, who are always budget-conscious, no matter how big they are,” he added.