St Aldates Upgrade to an M7CL

SFL install a Sound System Upgrade & Yamaha M7CL at St Aldates Church, Oxford

Mark Payne Reports:

'Oldie but Goodie'

The original sound and AV system was installed at St Aldates some 12 years ago and would still be regarded state of the art by many today. SFL are constantly working with St Aldates in a long term relationship to upgrade parts of the system that become costly to support, nearing end-of-life in terms of serviceability.

The original sound system designer specified d&b audiotechnick C6 and E9 speakers with E3 speakers as delays around the church. The total sound system is controlled by BSS Soundweb processors on which I performed a technical audit and realignment of around 2 years ago when we took over the service contract at the church. Since then we have not touched the Soundweb system and it continues to work impeccably.

Quality sound today is quality sound in 20 years!

The basic sound infrastructure is very good indeed and will last into the next two decades! The main mixing desk was however becoming a little long in the tooth with some failing channels and the start of a habit for eating power supplies! Following on from one of my training sessions held in situ at St Aldates over a year ago where we presented the Yamaha M7CL digital console to the technical team, they decided to take the plunge and enter the world of modern digital mixing!

Going Digital with Yamaha M7CL

The M7CL is the perfect console for St Aldates providing an 8 way matrix system to drive the different elements of the sound system. I was able to commission and configure the system in such a way as to make things easy for the operators, hiding and locking away any advanced features that the team agreed they would much rather not deal with!

The team at St Aldates are great sound engineers who all really welcomed the on board compressors and effects that make mixing on an M7CL such a dream. On installing the console we actually removed a stack of outboard processing and cable looms that were no longer required making a much simpler and elegant solution, taking up far less space.

We worked with the team to create an environment where they can totally recall each others mixes as they operate their duty rota allowing a much more consistent audio result for the musicians and congregation. They can choose the end of a good event as the starting point for the next meeting and the console can always be returned to a known state at the start of any session removing the problem of inheriting the 'last guys mix' by accident.

Training Training Training

We took the sound guys through an evening here at SFL in order to learn the basic concepts of the Yamaha M7CL in our training room. We do this by generating a lot of 'hands on' activity to familiarise people with the console by actually using it to mix tracks I have recorded live at various events.

I then hit the training home a second time by reviewing the course and performing another hands on session in the church with the team once the installation was complete. To be honest I find that engineers stop asking questions about the digital nature of the board and I spend more time teaching good sound engineering practice and basic mixing techniques.