Healing Rooms Restore the Spirit with Allen & Heath

Founded by Rick and Lori Taylor in 2000, the Healing Rooms Apostolic Center (HRAC) in Santa Maria, California recently added an Allen & Heath S7000 Digital Mixing System to its main 500-seat room. Used for live events and video and audio streaming, the console plays a central role within the 22,000 square-foot facility’s production capabilities, serving followers in both the US and abroad.

“The HRAC is a global resource where people receive healing, pray, and grow spiritually,” explains Jason Allen of Atascadero, California-based A-Town AV, the integration firm responsible for implementing the dLive S7000. “As one of the most heavily used stages on campus, the main room hosts services four days each week that are contemporary in style. The technology was chosen to foster creativity while providing a feast for the senses via audio, lighting, projectors, and LED video walls.”

With its own dedicated audio and video streaming rooms, the HRAC relies upon a fiber hub that spreads out and brings networked unity to every square inch of the facility. Equipped with a Dante card to help navigate this digital terrain, the S7000 system is constantly expanding its role under the direction of chief audio engineer Brian Williams, who oversees a staff of operators with varying degrees of experience.

“The console has been up and running since September of last year,” Allen notes of the S7000. “And throughout this time the staff has steadily added more layers of functionality to it. It’s super-powerful, sensitive, and the latency is incredibly low. The 26 assignable SoftKeys have been used to trigger scenes for live applications, and everyone enjoys the ability to create side-chains for compression, limiting, gating, and dynamics processing.”

A dLive DM48 MixRack with 48 mic/line inputs and 24 line outputs resides onstage in the main room, providing the real estate necessary to mic every single instrument and voice.

“Obtaining the highest quality sound is a priority at the center,” Allen adds. “Before the DM48 was installed most of the drum kit had to be captured with nothing more than a couple of overheads. Now there’s room to mic everything individually, and the sound is much more accurate. Guitarists onstage play directly into the S7000 using  one of the insert channels as well. Patching is seamless everywhere, and dLive actually made it simpler too.”