South Korea - The 4,000-seat Manna Methodist Church in Bundang New City offers five services a week and has expanded its output to include performances, attracting thousands of congregation members to the church and large audiences online. To maximise flexibility and accommodate their expanding channel count, the Manna Church team made the decision to replace their existing SD7 with two DiGiCo Quantum 852, one in the church for live performances and another in their broadcast suite to manage online audio.
Overseeing the purchase and installation was DiGiCo’s South Korean distributor, Soundus Corporation. Soundus also commissioned and completed the original installation in 2012 and sales engineer Sean Kim is a regular visitor to the church. For him, DiGiCo’s stability was a large part of the decision process.
“The initial choice to use DiGiCo consoles was based on the SD7’s ability to handle more than 200 input channels, with the dual engine offering stability, reliable redundancy and excellent sound quality,” he explains. “As the church also needed additional mixing consoles for the media suite, the DiGiCo solution maintains user familiarity and a consistency in audio quality.”
Ensuring the congregation members have agency in the choices made is a key factor for Manna Church, so 100 worshippers were invited to analyse the new system in its entirety before the purchase. The special audience listened to a variety of loudspeaker systems with live music, speech and playback all included. A d&b audiotechnik KSLi system, with SL-Subs, was chosen to accompany the new Quantum 852s.
The DiGiCo system includes three SD-Racks located behind the stage in a room adjacent to the broadcast suite, with an SD-MiNi Rack connecting all the loudspeaker outputs. Six musicians and a choir of up to 50 vocalists are positioned to the rear of the stage, with a 50-piece orchestra performing to the left. Up to 504 channels of audio are split by the Optocore fibre loop to the DiGiCo Quantum 852 console, located in the broadcast suite.
“We are really maximising the on-board processing of the Quantum 852 and we’re enjoying experimenting with Chilli and Mustard,” says audio engineer Jin Won Young. “The new v20 software features my new personal favourite, MSE and Spice Rack plugins. The Fourier transform.engine has further future-proofed our setup. The built-in control within the console’s open platform allows us to choose VST3 based plugins and does not limit us to specific suites of plugins, allowing us to experiment.”
